Nepal - Nested Data-Parallelism in Haskell

Manuel M. T. Chakravarty, Gabriele Keller, Roman Lechtchinsky and Wolf Pfannenstiel

In Rizos Sakellariou, John Keane, John R. Gurd, and Len Freeman, editors, Euro-Par '01: Proceedings of the 7th International Euro-Par Conference on Parallel Processing, pp. 524-534, Springer-Verlag, LNCS 2150, 2001.

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This paper discusses an extension of Haskell by support for nested data-parallel programming in the style of the special-purpose language Nesl. More precisely, the extension consists of a parallel array type, array comprehensions, and a set of primitive parallel array operations. This extension brings a hitherto unsupported style of parallel programming to Haskell. Moreover, nested data parallelism should receive wider attention when available in a standardised language like Haskell. This paper outlines the language extension and demonstrates its usefulness with two case studies.