Embodying parallel functional skeletons: An experimental implementation on top of MPI

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting an experimental but practical implementation of a skeleton-based parallel programming methodology based upon the integration of the MPI message-passing interface and a state-of-the-art ML compiler. The combination of a small number of higher-level communication abstractions and a SPMD style of programming has proven to provide a safe and fast way of designing parallel programs without loosing efficiency. The usefulness of the approach has been demonstrated by parallelising a complete image processing application.