Parallel/Glossary

A-H

bound thread

concurrency

distributed

distributed memory model

Haskell thread

A Haskell thread is a thread of execution for IO code. Multiple Haskell threads can execute IO code concurrently and they can communicate using shared mutable variables and channels. Haskell threads are ideal for applications like network servers where you need to do lots of I/O and using concurrency fits the nature of the problem.

N-R

parallel(ism)

S-Z

shared memory model

spark

Sparks are specific to parallel Haskell. Abstractly, a spark is a pure computation which may be evaluated in parallel. Sparks are introduced with the par combinator; the expression (x `par` y) "sparks off" x, telling the runtime that it may evaluate the value of x in parallel to other work. Whether or not a spark is evaluated in parallel with other computations, or other Haskell IO threads, depends on what your hardware supports and on how your program is written. Sparks are put in a work queue and when a CPU core is idle, it can execute a spark by taking one from the work queue and evaluating it.

Sparks are ideal for speeding up pure calculations where adding non-deterministic concurrency would just make things more complicated.

OS thread

thread

see Haskell thread, OS thread and bound thread