Cilk (pronounced "silk") is a C-based runtime system for multithreaded parallel programming. In this paper, we document the efficiency of the Cilk work-stealing scheduler, both empirically and analytically. We show that on real and synthetic applications, the "work" and "critical-path length" of a Cilk computation can be used to model performance accurately. Consequently, a Cilk programmer can focus on reducing the computation's work and critical-path length, insulated from load balancing and other runtime scheduling issues. We also prove that for the class of "fully strict" (well-structured) programs, the Cilk scheduler achieves space, time, and communication bounds all within a constant factor of optimal. The Cilk

There is a growing need for ad-hoc analysis of extremely large data sets, especially at internet companies where innovation critically depends on being able to analyze terabytes of data collected every day. Parallel database products, e.g., Teradata, offer a solution, but are usually prohibitively expensive at this scale. Besides, many of the people who analyze this data are entrenched procedural programmers, who find the declarative, SQL style to be unnatural. The success of the more procedural map-reduce programming model, and its associated scalable implementations on commodity hardware, is evidence of the above. However, the map-reduce paradigm is too low-level and rigid, and leads to a great deal of custom user code that is hard to maintain, and reuse. We describe a new language called Pig Latin that we have designed to fit in a sweet spot between the declarative style of SQL, and the low-level, procedural style of map-reduce. The accompanying system, Pig, is fully implemented, and compiles Pig Latin into physical plans that are executed over Hadoop, an open-source, map-reduce implementation. We give a few examples of how engineers at Yahoo! are using Pig to dramatically reduce the time required for the development and execution of their data analysis tasks, compared to using Hadoop directly. We also report on a novel debugging environment that comes integrated with Pig, that can lead to even higher productivity gains. Pig is an open-source, Apache-incubator project, and available for general use. 1.

We survey parallel programming models and languages using 6 criteria [:] should be easy to program, have a software development methodology, be architecture-independent, be easy to understand, guranatee performance, and provide info about the cost of programs. ... We consider programming models in 6 categories, depending on the level of abstraction they provide.

DryadLINQ is a system and a set of language extensions that enable a new programming model for large scale distributed computing. It generalizes previous execution environments such as SQL, MapReduce, and Dryad in two ways: by adopting an expressive data model of strongly typed.NET objects; and by supporting general-purpose imperative and declarative operations on datasets within a traditional high-level programming language. A DryadLINQ program is a sequential program composed of LINQ expressions performing arbitrary sideeffect-free transformations on datasets, and can be written and debugged using standard.NET development tools. The DryadLINQ system automatically and transparently translates the data-parallel portions of the program into a distributed execution plan which is passed to the Dryad execution platform. Dryad, which has been in continuous operation for several years on production clusters made up of thousands of computers, ensures efficient, reliable execution of this plan. We describe the implementation of the DryadLINQ compiler and runtime. We evaluate DryadLINQ on a varied set of programs drawn from domains such as web-graph analysis, large-scale log mining, and machine learning. We show that excellent absolute performance can be attained—a general-purpose sort of 1012 Bytes of data executes in 319 seconds on a 240-computer, 960disk cluster—as well as demonstrating near-linear scaling of execution time on representative applications as we vary the number of computers used for a job. 1

Many high-level parallel programming languages allow for fine-grained parallelism. As in the popular work-time framework for parallel algorithm design, programs written in such languages can express the full parallelism in the program without specifying the mapping of program tasks to processors. A common concern in executing such programs is to schedule tasks to processors dynamically so as to minimize not only the execution time, but also the amount of space (memory) needed. Without careful scheduling, the parallel execution on p processors can use a factor of p or larger more space than a sequential implementation of the same program. This paper first identifies a class of parallel schedules that are provably efficient in both time and space. For any

In this paper we prove time and space bounds for the implementation of the programming language NESL on various parallel machine models. NESL is a sugared typed J-calculus with a set of array primitives and an explicit parallel map over arrays. Our results extend previous work on provable implementation bounds for functional languages by considering space and by including arrays. For modeling the cost of NESL we augment a standard call-by-value operational semantics to return two cost measures: a DAG representing the sequential dependence in the computation, and a measure of the space taken by a sequential implementation. We show that a NESL program with w work (nodes in the DAG), d depth (levels in the DAG), and s sequential space can be implemented on a p processor butterfly network, hypercube, or CRCW PRAM usin O(w/p + d log p) time and 0(s + dp logp) reachable space. For programs with sufficient parallelism these bounds are optimal in that they give linew speedup and use space within a constant factor of the sequential space. 1

We describe the design and current status of our effort to implement the programming model of nested data parallelism into the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. We extended the original programmingmodel and its implementation, both of which were first popularised by the NESL language, in terms of expressiveness as well as efficiency. Our current aim is to provide a convenient programming environment for SMP parallelism, and especially multicore architectures. Preliminary benchmarks show that we are, at least for some programs, able to achieve good absolute performance and excellent speedups.

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The process of writing large parallel programs is complicated by the need to specify both the parallel behaviour of the program and the algorithm that is to be used to compute its result. This paper introduces evaluation strategies, lazy higher-order functions that control the parallel evaluation of non-strict functional languages. Using evaluation strategies, it is possible to achieve a clean separation between algorithmic and behavioural code. The result is enhanced clarity and shorter parallel programs. Evaluation strategies are a very general concept: this paper shows how they can be used to model a wide range of commonly used programming paradigms, including divideand -conquer, pipeline parallelism, producer/consumer parallelism, and data-oriented parallelism. Because they are based on unrestricted higher-order functions, they can also capture irregular parallel structures. Evaluation strategies are not just of theoretical interest: they have evolved out of our experience in parallelising several large-scale applications, where they have proved invaluable in helping to manage the complexities of parallel behaviour. These applications are described in detail here. The largest application we have studied to date, Lolita, is a 60,000 line natural language parser. Initial results show that for these applications we can achieve acceptable parallel performance, while incurring minimal overhead for using evaluation strategies.

There has been a great deal of interest recently in the development of general-purpose bridging models for parallel computation. Models such as the BSP and LogP have been proposed as more realistic alternatives to the widely used PRAM model. The BSP and LogP models imply a rather different style for designing algorithms when compared with the PRAM model. Indeed, while many consider data parallelism as a convenient style, and the shared-memory abstraction as an easyto-use platform, the bandwidth limitations of current machines have diverted much attention to message-passing and distributed-memory models (such as the BSP and LogP) that account more properly for these limitations. In this paper we consider the question of whether a shared-memory model can serve as an effective bridging model for parallel computation. In particular, can a shared-memory model be as effective as, say, the BSP? As a candidate for a bridging model, we introduce the Queuing Shared-Memory (QSM) model, which accounts for limited communication bandwidth while still providing a simple shared-memory abstraction. We substantiate the ability of the QSM to serve as a bridging model by providing a simple work-preserving emulation of the QSM on both the BSP, and on a related model, the (d, x)-BSP. We present evidence that the features of the QSM are essential to its effectiveness as a bridging model. In addition, we describe scenarios