6.15.1. Concurrent and Parallel Haskell¶
6.15.1.1. Concurrent Haskell¶
Concurrent Haskell is the name given to GHC’s concurrency extension. It is enabled by default, so no special flags are required. The Concurrent Haskell paper is still an excellent resource, as is Tackling the awkward squad.
To the programmer, Concurrent Haskell introduces no new language constructs; rather, it appears simply as a library, Control.Concurrent. The functions exported by this library include:
- Forking and killing threads.
- Sleeping.
- Synchronised mutable variables, called
MVars
- Support for bound threads; see the paper Extending the FFI with concurrency.
6.15.1.2. Parallel Haskell¶
GHC includes support for running Haskell programs in parallel on
symmetric, shared-memory multi-processor (SMP). By default GHC runs
your program on one processor; if you want it to run in parallel you
must link your program with the -threaded
, and run it with the RTS
-N ⟨x⟩
option; see Using SMP parallelism). The runtime will schedule the
running Haskell threads among the available OS threads, running as many in
parallel as you specified with the -N ⟨x⟩
RTS option.
6.15.1.3. Annotating pure code for parallelism¶
Ordinary single-threaded Haskell programs will not benefit from enabling
SMP parallelism alone: you must expose parallelism to the compiler. One
way to do so is forking threads using Concurrent Haskell
(Concurrent Haskell), but the simplest mechanism for extracting
parallelism from pure code is to use the par
combinator, which is
closely related to (and often used with) seq
. Both of these are
available from the
parallel library:
infixr 0 `par`
infixr 1 `pseq`
par :: a -> b -> b
pseq :: a -> b -> b
The expression (x `par` y)
sparks the evaluation of x
(to weak
head normal form) and returns y
. Sparks are queued for execution in
FIFO order, but are not executed immediately. If the runtime detects
that there is an idle CPU, then it may convert a spark into a real
thread, and run the new thread on the idle CPU. In this way the
available parallelism is spread amongst the real CPUs.
For example, consider the following parallel version of our old nemesis,
nfib
:
import Control.Parallel
nfib :: Int -> Int
nfib n | n <= 1 = 1
| otherwise = par n1 (pseq n2 (n1 + n2))
where n1 = nfib (n-1)
n2 = nfib (n-2)
For values of n
greater than 1, we use par
to spark a thread to
evaluate nfib (n-1)
, and then we use pseq
to force the parent
thread to evaluate nfib (n-2)
before going on to add together these
two subexpressions. In this divide-and-conquer approach, we only spark a
new thread for one branch of the computation (leaving the parent to
evaluate the other branch). Also, we must use pseq
to ensure that
the parent will evaluate n2
before n1
in the expression
(n1 + n2 + 1)
. It is not sufficient to reorder the expression as
(n2 + n1 + 1)
, because the compiler may not generate code to
evaluate the addends from left to right.
Note that we use pseq
rather than seq
. The two are almost
equivalent, but differ in their runtime behaviour in a subtle way:
seq
can evaluate its arguments in either order, but pseq
is
required to evaluate its first argument before its second, which makes
it more suitable for controlling the evaluation order in conjunction
with par
.
When using par
, the general rule of thumb is that the sparked
computation should be required at a later time, but not too soon. Also,
the sparked computation should not be too small, otherwise the cost of
forking it in parallel will be too large relative to the amount of
parallelism gained. Getting these factors right is tricky in practice.
It is possible to glean a little information about how well par
is
working from the runtime statistics; see RTS options to control the garbage collector.
More sophisticated combinators for expressing parallelism are available
from the Control.Parallel.Strategies
module in the parallel
package. This module
builds functionality around par
, expressing more elaborate patterns
of parallel computation, such as parallel map
.