Implicit Parallel Programming in pH - Hardcover

Nikhil, Rishiyur; Arvind

9781558606449: Implicit Parallel Programming in pH

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558606440 ISBN 13: 9781558606449

Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann, 2001

Parallel machines are now affordable and available to many users in the form of small symmetric shared-memory multiprocessors (SMPs). Unfortunately, programming practices have not kept pace with this hardware advance. The vast majority of developers still write applications in sequential programming languages that do not exploit multiple processors. The traditional approaches for adding parallelism to applications are prone to introducing new, strange, and difficult-to-eliminate bugs.

In this important new text, the authors offer a completely different vision of the future, where parallel programming is the default and sequential programming is a special case. The foundation of this vision is an implicitly parallel programming language, pH, which is the result of two decades of research by the authors. A dialect and extension of the standard nonstrict and purely functional language Haskell, pH is essentially Haskell with implicitly parallel semantics. pH's extensions to Haskell comprise a disciplined approach to shared parallel state, so that a pH program-even a beginner's program-is implicitly parallel.

The authors have developed this text over ten years while teaching implicit parallel programming to graduate students at MIT and specialized short courses to undergraduates and software professionals in the U.S., Japan, and India.

* Provides a complete treatment of the language, the programming philosophy it embraces, and its theoretical underpinnings.
* Includes many clear yet small examples.
* Features programs, problems, solutions, and a downloadable pH implementation for SMP machines and related software.
* Is designed for students and professionals with a thorough knowledge of a high-level programming language but with no previous experience in parallel programming.

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Review:

Suitable for the mathematically adept researcher or computer science student, Implicit Parallel Programming in pH provides a textbook-style guide to the new pH computer language, a functional language syntactically similar to Haskell but with built-in support for parallel processing.

Besides providing a perspective on the issues of parallel processing, this text is first and foremost an in-depth tutorial to the pH language (which was developed at MIT). While many programmers have managed threads and processes explicitly, pH makes parallel computing automatic. Because it is a functional programming language with limited support for program state, algorithms can be efficiently "parallelized" automatically with little or no programmer intervention.

After introducing the state of parallel programming today, the book delves in with an intensive (and mathematically astute) tutorial for working in pH from the basic syntax of the language to rules of encoding algorithms effectively. The raw syntax of pH resembles Haskell, a well-known functional programming language. To help the beginner, the authors also provide a tutorial for the lambda calculus (which provides the underpinnings of functional programming languages) in an appendix. Samples include problems using linear algebra and chemistry (with paraffin molecules) that help round out concepts for the reader.

Later chapters cover the extensions in pH for sequential programming and sharing data between modules. I-structures, first of all, allow multiple processes to read data in parallel, while M-structures allow read-and-write access to mutable data. (Used sparingly, these techniques supplement the purely functional aspects of pH, which language by default eschews program variables used in traditional sequential programming.)

Short exercises supplement each chapter, and the book concludes with a discussion of the future of pH (currently a research project) and parallel programming in general. The authors envision a day when parallel programming is the norm and sequential programming is the exception. In the meantime, this intelligent and fast-moving computer science title can help put parallel computing (and functional programming) into the hands of any interested computer science student or researcher. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

Overview of parallel execution techniques (explicit and implicit parallel programming)
Functional languages
Basic tutorial for pH (data types, recursion, block, static scoping, and loops)
Types and types checking (including static type checking, polymorphism, and operator overloading)
Rewrite rules, reduction strategies, and parallelism
Determinacy and termination
Tuples and algebraic product types (including rewrite rules for algebraic types)
Lists and algebraic sum types
Sums of products
Lists and list comprehensions
Graphs and binary trees
Arrays and multidimensional arrays
Techniques for solving linear equations
Sample problems from chemistry (modeling paraffins)
Sequencing
Monadic and parallel I/O
Explicit sequencing and barriers
I-structures
M-structures
Arrays
Lists and graphs (mutable synchronized state)
The future of parallelism and the pH language
Tutorial for lambda calculus
Reference for rewrite rules for pH

About the Author:

Rishiyur S. Nikhil is the Director of Software at Sandburst Corporation, where he manages the development of software for hardware synthesis. He has devoted seventeen years to designing and implementing languages and architectures as a researcher at the Cambridge Research Laboratory of DEC and Compaq Computer Corporation and as a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT.

Arvind is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT and President and founder of Sandburst Corporation, a new style chips company that exploits his recent research on high-level specification and description of architectures and protocols using term rewriting systems. He is an IEEE Fellow and was awarded the Charles Babbage Outstanding Scientist Award.

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