research-article

Seeing the futures: profiling shared-memory parallel racket

Authors:

Burke Fetscher,

Vincent St-Amour,

Robert Bruce Findler,

Matthew FlattAuthors Info & Claims

FHPC '12: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Functional high-performance computing

Pages 73 - 82

https://doi.org/10.1145/2364474.2364485

Published: 15 September 2012 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents the latest chapter in our adventures coping with a large, sequentially-tuned, legacy runtime system in today's parallel world. Specifically, this paper introduces our new graphical visualizer that helps programmers understand how to program in parallel with Racket's futures and, to some extent, what performs well in sequential Racket.

Overall, our experience with parallelism in Racket is that we can achieve reasonable parallel performance in Racket without sacrificing the most important property of functional programming language implementations, namely safety. That is, Racket programmers are guaranteed that every Racket primitive (and thus all functions built using Racket primitives) will either behave properly, or it will signal an error explaining what went wrong.

That said, however, it is challenging to understand how to best use futures to achieve interesting speedups, and the visualizer is our attempt to more widely disseminate key performance details of the runtime system in order to help Racket programmers maximize performance.

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Matthew Flatt and PLT. Reference: Racket. PLT Inc., PLT-TR-2010-1, 2010. http://racket-lang.org/tr1/.

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Colin Runciman and David Wakeling. Profiling Parallel Functional Computations (Without Parallel Machines). In Proc. Glasgow Workshop on Functional Programming, pp. 236--251, 1993.

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Vincent St-Amour, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Matthew Flatt, and Matthias Felleisen. Typing the Numeric Tower. In Proc. Intl. Symp. Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages, 2012.

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James Swaine, Kevin Tew, Peter Dinda, Robert Bruce Findler, and Matthew Flatt. Back to the Futures: Incremental Parallelization of Existing Sequential Runtimes. In Proc. ACM Intl. Conf. on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, 2010.

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Kevin Tew, James Swaine, Matthew Flatt, Robert Bruce Findler, and Peter Dinda. Places: Adding Message-Passing Parallelism to Racket. In Proc. Dynamic Languages Symposium, 2011.

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Cited By

MOY CFELLEISEN M(2023)Trace contractsJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682300009633Online publication date: 13-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796823000096
Hale KDinda P(2018)An Evaluation of Asynchronous Software Events on Modern Hardware2018 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS)10.1109/MASCOTS.2018.00041(355-368)Online publication date: Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/MASCOTS.2018.00041
Hale KDinda P(2016)Enabling Hybrid Parallel Runtimes Through Kernel and Virtualization SupportACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3007611.289225551:7(161-175)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3007611.2892255
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Seeing the futures: profiling shared-memory parallel racket
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Parallel computing methodologies
    1. Parallel programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Functional languages
        Parallel programming languages

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

FHPC '12: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Functional high-performance computing

September 2012

110 pages

ISBN:9781450315777

DOI:10.1145/2364474

Program Chairs:
Andrzej Filinski
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
,
Clemens Grelck
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 September 2012

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ICFP'12

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SIGPLAN

ICFP'12: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 15, 2012

Copenhagen, Denmark

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Overall Acceptance Rate 18 of 25 submissions, 72%

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ICFP '25

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ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

October 12 - 18, 2025

Singapore , Singapore

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Cited By

MOY CFELLEISEN M(2023)Trace contractsJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682300009633Online publication date: 13-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796823000096
Hale KDinda P(2018)An Evaluation of Asynchronous Software Events on Modern Hardware2018 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS)10.1109/MASCOTS.2018.00041(355-368)Online publication date: Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/MASCOTS.2018.00041
Hale KDinda P(2016)Enabling Hybrid Parallel Runtimes Through Kernel and Virtualization SupportACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3007611.289225551:7(161-175)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3007611.2892255
Hale KDinda PGupta-Cledat VPorter DSarkar V(2016)Enabling Hybrid Parallel Runtimes Through Kernel and Virtualization SupportProceedings of the12th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments10.1145/2892242.2892255(161-175)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2892242.2892255

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