The research presented in this thesis is about the design and implementation of Naira, a parallel, parallelising compiler for a rich, purely functional programming language. The source language of the compiler is a subset of Haskell 1.2. The front end of Naira is written entirely in the Haskell subset being compiled. Naira has been successfully parallelised and it is the largest successfully parallelised Haskell program having achieved good absolute speedups on a network of SUN workstations. Having the same basic structure as other production compilers of functional languages, Naira's parallelisation technology should carry forward to other functional language compilers. The back end of Naira is written in C and generates parallel code in the C language which is envisioned to be run on distributed-memory machines. The code generator is based on a novel compilation scheme specified using a restricted form of Milner's ß-calculus which achieves asynchronous communication. We present the f...

A clustered architecture has been designed to exploit divide and conquer parallelism in functional programs. The programming methodology developed for the machine is based on explicit annotations and program transformations. It has been successfully applied to a number of algorithms resulting in a benchmark of small and medium size parallel functional programs. Sophisticated compilation techniques are used such as strictness analysis on non-flat domains and RISC and VLIW code generation. Parallel jobs are distributed by an efficient hierarchical scheduler. A special processor for graph reduction has been designed as a basic building block for the machine. A prototype of a single cluster machine has been constructed with stock hardware. This paper describes the experience with the project and its current state. 1 Introduction Functional programming is founded on the lambda calculus, which is a mathematical theory that provides a sound basis for work on reduction machines [5]. This is p...

This paper surveys sequential and parallel implementation techniques for functional programming languages, as well as optimizations that can improve their performance. Sequential implementations have evolved from simple interpreters to sophisticated super-combinator-based compilers, while most parallel implementations have explored a broad range of techniques. We analyze the purpose and function of each implementation technique and discuss the current state-of-the-art in functional language implementation.