[Haskell-cafe] [GSoC] Parallel Benchmarking and Profiling

[Don Stewart]

etienne:
> Hello,
> 
> I am putting together a student proposal to participate in Google's
> Summer of Code with one of the following project ideas.
> 
> Parallel programming benchmarking and benchmark suite
> - http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1544
> 
> Are there open source projects and real world applications that rely
> on GHC's parrallel programming primitives and libraries? I have found

There's many applications on hackage that depend on Control.Concurrent,
forkIO, Channels, MVars and software transactional memory. Relatively
few yet depend on `par` and lightweight parallelism.

> many references to LOLITA, but it seems to be old and not available
> online. The idea page suggests porting existing benchmark suites such
> as PARSEC, but PARSEC is 5G of C code. Most of it seems to come from
> existing applications already written in C. It might also be

Yes, the benefit here would be to build up a set of haskell programs
that do lean on the parallel libraries and primitives. Porting 
algorithms from the benchmark suite would be one useful way to do that.

> interesting to automate the discovery of optimal strategies through
> empirical data, and to modify the thresholds dynamically.
  
See the recent paper by Satnam Singh and Tim Harris,

    http://research.microsoft.com/~satnams/fdp.pdf

on feedback-directed implicit parallelism for Haskell.

> Parallel profiling tools for GHC
> - http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1559
> 
> Simon Marlow wrote on the idea page that Gransim was ported to a more
> up-to-date GHC. The documentation available on the web seems to be for
> GHC 0.29 but it describes many options for logging and visualising the
> activity of threads and processors over time. Getting GHC to display
> that information on the frontpanel would make a nice project.
> 
> Do you have any comments or suggestions?
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Etienne Laurin
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