Abstract

This paper describes the development of a parallel, functional algorithm for a real-world computer algebra problem: solving a system of linear equations. The program was developed using our GranSim simulator for parallel Haskell, which is based on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. We provide concrete simulation results for a variety of machine architectures characterised by differences in communications latency. These demonstrate absolute speedups over the sequential algorithm of 20.12 for 32 processors on a tightly-coupled distributed-memory machine, similar to our GRIP multiprocessor. Comparisons are also given with the same program executed on the physical GRIP machine, and with a previously produced imperative version. While the functional program exploits parallelism better (and so is more scalable), absolute performance is (sadly) still better for the imperative program. 1 Introduction In the imperative world, novel algorithms are often embedded into special purpose solutions for s...

Citations