Parallel functional programming in Eden

Abstract

Eden extends the non-strict functional language Haskell with constructs to control parallel evaluation of processes. Although processes are defined explicitly, communication and synchronisation issues are handled in a way transparent to the programmer. In order to offer effective support for parallel evaluation, Eden's coordination constructs override the inherently sequential demand-driven (lazy) evaluation strategy of its computation language Haskell. Eden is a general-purpose parallel functional language suitable for developing sophisticated skeletons – which simplify parallel programming immensely – as well as for exploiting more irregular parallelism that cannot easily be captured by a predefined skeleton. The paper gives a comprehensive description of Eden, its semantics, its skeleton-based programming methodology – which is applied in three case studies – its implementation and performance. Furthermore it points at many additional results that have been achieved in the context of the Eden project.