Re: [Caml-list] Concurrent/parallel programming

[Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com>]

It's also probably worth trying to understand what went wrong with
parmap.  Might make sense to email their dev list...

y

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky@janestreet.com> wrote:
> 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