Re: [Caml-list] Concurrent/parallel programming

[Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com>]

This is indeed something that is not well covered in RWO.  That said,
the Async_parallel library is aimed at this kind of target.  No shared
memory region, just some automation around spinning up processes and
communicating jobs between them.

CC'ing Eric Stokes, who is the primary author of the library.

y


On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 2:54 PM, Yotam Barnoy <yotambarnoy@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi List
>
> So far, I've been programming in ocaml using only sequential programs. In my
> last project, which was an implementation of a large machine learning
> algorithm, I tried to speed up computation using a little bit of parallelism
> with ParMap, and it was a complete failure. It's possible that more time
> would have yielded better results, but I just didn't have the time to invest
> in it given how bad the initial results were.
>
> My question is, what are the options right now as far as parallelism is
> concerned? I'm not talking about cooperative multitasking, but about really
> taking advantage of multiple cores. I'm well aware of the runtime lock and
> I'm ok with message passing between processes or a shared area in memory,
> but I'd rather have something more high level than starting up several
> processes, creating a named pipe or a socket, and trying to pass messages
> through that. Also, I assume that using a shared area in memory involves
> some C code? Am I wrong about that?
>
> I was expecting Core's Async to fill this role, but realworldocaml is fuzzy
> on this topic, apparently preferring to dwell on cooperative multitasking
> (which is fine but not what I'm looking for), and I couldn't find any other
> documentation that was clearer.
>
> Thanks
> Yotam