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Conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture

FPCA 1985: Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture pp 382–399Cite as

Serial combinators: "optimal" grains of parallelism

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 201))

Abstract

A method is described for translating a high-level functional program into combinators suitable for execution on multiprocessors with no shared memory. It is argued that the granularity of the standard set of fixed combinators is too fine, whereas the granularity of user-defined functions is too coarse. The notion of a serial combinator is introduced that in some sense has optimal granularity, and that takes into account pragmatic issues such as the complexity of expressions and communication costs between processors. The technique improves on the standard notion of super-combinators by making them larger to retain locality and improve efficiency, and by ensuring that they have no concurrent substructure that could result in lost parallelism. Simulation results demonstrate improved performance on both sequential and parallel computing models.

This research was supported in part by NSF Grant MCS-8302018 and a grant from Burroughs Corporation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Yale University, Yale Station, Box 2158, 06520, New Haven, CT

    Paul Hudak & Benjamin Goldberg

Authors
  1. Paul Hudak
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  2. Benjamin Goldberg
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Jean-Pierre Jouannaud

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© 1985 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Hudak, P., Goldberg, B. (1985). Serial combinators: "optimal" grains of parallelism. In: Jouannaud, JP. (eds) Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture. FPCA 1985. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 201. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-15975-4_49

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-15975-4_49

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-15975-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39677-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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