Re: [Caml-list] More cores

["Hezekiah M. Carty" <hcarty@atmos.umd.edu>]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 4:27 PM, Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 09:37:32PM +0100, Oliver Bandel wrote:
> [...]
>> P.S.: During the last multicore discussion, I found that link,
>>       but had not tried OCamlp3l. Now I think I will have more
>>       time and motivation and it could be compiled and installed
>>       without any problems with OCaml 3.10.2.
>
> Has anyone tried it with 3.11?
>
> I had an idea to try out some fork-based OCaml programming to exploit
> the 4 & 8 core machines we have here, but maybe can try this instead.

The prelude.ml project has some fork-based parallel functions for
lists, arrays, strings and bigarrays:

http://github.com/kig/preludeml/tree/master/prelude.ml

While I have not tried OCamlp3l on 3.11 yet, my guess is that it would
work.  It is a pure-OCaml set of libraries along with some helper
scripts/programs and as far as I know there is not any camlp4
involved.  After speaking with the authors, the package does seem to
be more focused on distributed computing than local parallelism.  It
is still possible to use it for local parallelism though.  OCamlp3l is
currently going through a rewrite as Camlp3l though the restructuring
is not complete at this point.  CVS repositories for both are here --
http://camlcvs.inria.fr/cgi-bin/cvsweb/bazar-ocaml/

Please let us know how it goes if you do try one or both of these out.

Hez