Performance/Parallel

The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

Tips and tricks for better multicore parallel performance from your Haskell.

Which GHC version to use

The recommended version of GHC for parallel programming at the moment (Apr 2009) is GHC 6.12 (aka the HEAD branch of GHC), which has had extensive tuning.

Affinity

Parallel GC

Using n-1 cores

GHC has parallel garbage collection since 2007 already. However, recent work showed that this parallel GC sometimes hampers performance, based on various factors, in particular on Linux systems. See this thread for more: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2009-April/017050.html

GHC 6.10.2 contains some slightly bogus heuristics about when to turn on the parallel GC, and it just so happens that 8 processors tips it over the point where the parallel GC is enabled for young-generation collections. In 6.10.2 the parallel GC really didn't help most of the time, but it has undergone a lot of tuning since then, and in the HEAD things are much better (see the results from our ICFP submission).

Disabling parallel GC

In the meantime you might get somewhere by disabling parallel GC altogether (+RTS -g1), but as the results in our paper show, sometimes the parallel GC is essential for retaining locality in parallel

Best flags for parallel GC

Don't forget the -qg0 -qb flags with HEAD, these flags usually give the best parallel GC performance at the moment (Apr 2009)

Sparks

Data Parallel Arrays

Tool Support

Tools for parallel performance tuning:

ThreadScope: GHC (HEAD 2009) supports a visual post-mortem analysis, and a graphical tool "ThreadScope" has been developed by Satnam Singh and others.

More information

Runtime Support for Multicore Haskell (Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton Jones, Satnam Singh) Submitted to ICFP'09, March 2009