A Compiler for an Implicitly Parallel Functional Language

Functional programming presents a relatively unexplored approach to achieving high- performance computing. Typically, the field has been dominated by imperative languages such as C/C++ and FORTRAN. However, purely functional languages use functions without side effects, a characteristic that can prove useful when parallelizing code. The goal of this research was to create an automatic parallelizing compiler for functional programs. The compiler uses the LLVM infrastructure to transform Lisp-like source code into parallelized LLVM bytecode. The LLVM bytecode is then used to generate machine code that executes on multiple processors with multiple cores. Parallelism is clearly a critical technology of the future, but presents new challenges to developers. Much as high-level languages with optimizing compilers have supplanted hand-written assembly, automatic parallelization optimized for specific architectures is poised to eliminate error-prone manual multiprogramming