Artifact for "Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo: Extensible Deterministic Parallelism with LVish"

Welcome to the artifact evaluation bundle for "Taming the Parallel Effect Zoo!"

Submitted version of paper (superseded by camera-ready version)

Build instructions

Using Docker

Install Docker. If your Docker installation requires root, then prefix the following commands with sudo.

The simplest way

1. docker build -t pldi2014-artifact github.com/iu-parfunc/pldi2014-artifact
2. docker run -i -t pldi2014-artifact /bin/bash
3. Look around at the results as described below

The pre-built way

If you use this approach, note that the benchmark results were generated on our machines, not by you! If you want to do it yourself, see the run-the-benchmarks-yourself way, described below.

1. docker pull iuparfunc/pldi2014-artifact:bench
2. docker run -i -t iuparfunc/pldi2014-artifact:bench /bin/bash
3. Look around at the results as described below

The run-the-benchmarks-yourself way

1. docker pull iuparfunc/pldi2014-artifact:build
2. docker run -e USER=pldi -i -t iuparfunc/pldi2014-artifact:build /bin/bash
3. cd pldi2014-artifact
4. Build everything (will take some time): run make everything
5. Look around at the results as described below

Not using Docker

Note that GHC 7.6.3 and Cabal 1.18 are required.

1. Install the Haskell Platform, version 2013.2.0.0, including GHC 7.6.3
2. Install Cabal 1.18 or newer
3. Clone the artifact repo: run git clone https://github.com/iu-parfunc/pldi2014-artifact.git
4. cd pldi2014-artifact
5. Build everything (will take some time -- allow several hours): run make everything
6. Look around at the results as described below

Troubleshooting

I got a cabal: unrecognised command: sandbox error!

What does cabal --version say? If you have a version older than 1.18, you'll need to upgrade to 1.18 or newer to support the sandbox feature.

I got a cabal: Could not resolve dependencies error!

What does ghc --version say? Make sure to use GHC 7.6.3.

AEC conflicts

Eric Holk, Vincent St-Amour

Artifact description

There are three components to this bundle:

• Benchmark results
• LVish documentation
• LVish code examples

LVars are monotonically growing, lattice-based data structures for deterministic parallel programming. LVish is a Haskell library for programming with LVars.

First, follow the instructions for downloading and building the artifact bundle. Doing so will install LVish and its dependencies, build the LVish documentation and examples, and run the benchmarks.

Benchmark results

PhyBin

Benchmark results for PhyBin, the LVish bioinformatics application described in section 7.1 of the paper, should appear in phybin_results.txt.

If you ran make everything, phybin_results.txt should already exist. Alternatively, to build and run only the PhyBin benchmarks, run make phybin_bench.

Monad transformer overhead

Benchmark results for evaluating monad tranformer overhead, described in section 7.2 of the paper, should appear in transformer_results.txt.

If you ran make everything, transformer_results.txt should already exist. Alternatively, to build and run only the transformer benchmarks, run make transformer_bench.

Parallel merge sort

Benchmark results for parallel merge sort in LVish, described in section 7.3 of the paper, should appear in

• hs_mergesort_results.txt
• c_mergesort_results.txt

Each of those files will contain three numbers, one per line, which are running times (in seconds) on 1, 2, and 4 cores, respectively. c_mergesort_results.txt is the version that bottoms out with a library call to a sequential C sort (the version marked as "ParST/C" in Figure 5 of the paper); hs_mergesort_results.txt is a pure Haskell version ("ParST/HSonly" in the table in Figure 5 of the paper).

If you ran make everything, hs_mergesort_results.txt and c_mergesort_results.txt should already exist. Alternatively, to build and run only the merge sort benchmarks, run make mergesort_bench.

LVish documentation

The Haddock-generated HTML documentation will appear inside the .cabal-sandbox/share/doc/ directory.

The main package provides the entrypoint Control.LVish, as well as various LVar datatypes.

Par-transformers layers on additonal effects not found in the main module.

LVish code examples

The directory LVish-examples/2.0/ contains a variety of toy examples of LVish programs. See LVish-examples/2.0/README.md for more details.