Apurdue.138
net.applic
utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!purdue!dar
Sat Dec 19 18:12:05 1981
FFP program analysis
As Scott Baden (ucbvax!baden) alluded earlier, there is an
FFP interpreter up and running at Purdue.  The intent is to
gather some statistics about the relative frequencies of various
language operators as a prelude to the design and analysis of some
parallel hardware to support applicative languages.  I would be
interested in any ideas about what suitable machine primitives
should be.

The absence of side-effects in functional programs has caused a
gleam in the eye of more than one hardware designer.  As a
practical matter, the transition from a sequential phase of processing
to a parallel phase of processing requires either program/data
copying and distribution to multiple processors or sharing with
its consequent memory contention.  It is actually possible for
the startup overhead to negate any possible time reduction one
might hope to obtain from parallel evaluation.  It seems that
the ratio processing time/communication overhead is critical.
By taking a small number of FFP programs and assigning execution
times to the language primitives, I've obtained a few plots of
theoretical parallelism vs time.  The curves tend to have
many large "spikes."  That is, parallelism vs time changes
both dramatically and frequently.  This may be a function of
the programs I have or the assignment of execution times.
Any conflicting evidence/ideas/comments out there?

Also, does anyone have any FP/FFP programs they would be willing
to let me have for analysis?

                       Dan Reed (purdue!dar)

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