Towards a characterisation of parallel functional applications

To devise novel parallelism control mechanisms further insights into dynamic behaviour of parallel functional programs and run-time systems (RTS) are needed. We use profiling to characterise eight applications on a multi-core and on a multi-core cluster. We focus on thread granularity, memory management and communication. Our results confirm that parallel Haskell implementations cope well with large numbers of potential threads, identify memory management overhead as a key limiting factor in a shared-memory RTS, whilst in the distributed RTS, the amount of sharing determines the dominant communication overhead.