Matthew Fluet

(Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago),

"Functional Programming Perspectives on Concurrency and Parallelism"

(Institutkolloguium am Max Planck Institut für Software-Systeme)

The trend in microprocessor design toward multicore processors has sparked renewed interest in programming languages and language features for harnessing concurrency and parallelism in commodity applications. Past research efforts demonstrated that functional programming provides a good semantic base for concurrent- and parallel-language designs, but slowed in the absence of widely available multiprocessor machines. I will describe new functional programming approaches towards concurrency and parallelism, grounded in more recent functional programming research.
To frame the discussion, I will introduce the Manticore project, an effort to design and implement a new functional language for parallel programming. Unlike some earlier parallel language proposals, Manticore is a heterogenous language that supports parallelism at multiple levels. In this talk, I will describe a number of Manticore's notable features, including implicitly-parallel programming constructs (inspired by common functional programming idioms) and a flexible runtime model that supports multiple scheduling disciplines. I will also take a deeper and more technical look at transactional events, a novel concurrency abstraction that combines first-class synchronous message-passing events with all-or-nothing transactions. This combination enables elegant solutions to interesting problems in concurrent programming. Transactional events have a rich compositional structure, inspired by the use of monads for describing effectful computations in functional programming. I will conclude with future research directions in the Manticore project, aiming to combine static and dynamic information for the implementation and optimization of parallel constructs.

Zeit:	Montag, 23. März 2009, 16:00 Uhr
Ort:	Saarbrücken, Gebäude E1.4, Raum 019
Hinweis:	Der Vortrag wird live an die TU Kaiserslautern Gebäude 49 Raum 204-206 übertragen.