Accelerating Haskell on a Dataflow Architecture: a case study including Transactional Memory

A possible direction for exploiting the computational power of multi/many core chips is to rely on a massive usage of Thread Level Parallelism (TLP). We focus on the Decoupled Threaded Architecture, a hybrid dataflow architecture which efficiently uses TLP by decoupling and scheduling threads on chip processing elements in order to provide on-chip scalable performance. The DTA architecture currently lacks a specific mapping to high level languages. Our idea is to use a functional language to match this execution paradigm because we think it is very fit for this environment. We choose Haskell as our language and in particular one of the features we want to implement is the concurrency control based on Transactional Memory, which is fully supported in Haskell. The main goal of this research is twofold. First, the study of a method to unite the functional paradigm of the Haskell programming language with the DTA execution paradigm. Second, the development of a Transactional Memory model for DTA architecture based on the STM (Software Transactional Memory) API. %To achieve this goals, we have implemented a tool chain, which translates simple programs from Haskell to DTA and created a first version of the Transactional Memory mechanism in DTA. Our results show promising speedup of the Haskell based front-end for the DTA architecture