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.

• Participants: François Clément and Pierre Weis

• Contact: François Clément

• URL: http://sklml.inria.fr