[fpunion] [crosspost] Paul Bone's Phd Conversion Seminar.

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Paul Bone

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May 19, 2010, 2:15:55 AM5/19/10

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Phd Conversion Seminar
======================

Speaker: Paul Bone
Supervisor: Zoltan Somogyi
Date: 3rd of June, 2010
Time: 2pm - 3pm.
Venue: 5.08

Title: Automatic Parallelisation in Mercury.

Abstract:

The rate at which computers are becoming faster at sequential
execution has dropped significantly. Instead parallel processing
power is increasing, and multicore computers are now common.
Automatically parallelising programs is becoming much more desirable.
Parallelisation of programs written in imperative languages is very
difficult. In contrast, it is trivial to determine if it is safe to
parallelise part of a program written in a pure declarative language.
However, it is difficult to determine if parallelising part of any
program is an optimisation. Frequently parallelisation can lead to
cases where the overheads of parallel execution outweigh the speedup
that might have been available by parallelising the program.

Mercury --- a purely declarative logic programming language ---
provides a good framework for automatic parallelisation. Mercury
already supports explicit parallelism of dependent conjunctions, as
well as powerful profiling tools which generate data for our analysis.

Our automatic parallelisation analysis is novel in that it estimates
to what extent dependent parallel conjunctions can be executed in
parallel. We will describe how this works and provide some
preliminary benchmarks, and if possible a demonstration. We will also
discuss some limitations and the proposed solutions to work around
them.

--
CSSE Postgrad Seminiar Coordinator
Google calendar for seminars: http://tinyurl.com/27jtvuz