Section: New Software and Platforms
Sklml
The OCaml parallel skeleton system
Keywords: Parallel programming - Functional programming
Scientific Description: Writing parallel programs is not easy, and debugging them is usually a nightmare. To cope with these difficulties, the skeleton programming approach uses a set of predefined patterns for parallel computations. The skeletons are higher order functional templates that describe the program underlying parallelism.
Sklml is a new framework for parallel programming that embeds an innovative compositional skeleton algebra into the OCaml language. Thanks to its skeleton algebra, Sklml provides two evaluation regimes to programs: a regular sequential evaluation (merely used for prototyping and debugging) and a parallel evaluation obtained via a recompilation of the same source program in parallel mode.
Sklml was specifically designed to prove that the sequential and parallel evaluation regimes coincide.
Functional Description: Sklml is a functional parallel skeleton compiler and programming system for OCaml programs. Slogan is “easy coarse grain parallelization”.
News Of The Year: Caml preprocessors are no longer needed.