On the Implementation of Applicative Languages on Shared-Memory, MIMD Multiprocessors

This paper presents the performance of a set of algorithms written in SISAL [MSA*85] and run on multiprocessor Sequent, DEC, and Cray computers. We describe our current runtime system and discuss its implementation on each machine. We indicate where our automatic approach to parallelization works well, as well as sources of inefficient behavior. Overall we find our systems encouraging for the first release of the native-code generating software. We suggest improvements to the compiler and runtime systems, many already developed but not yet implemented, to alleviate the inefficiencies.