MultiCore Parallelisation for Hume

With the emergence of commodity multicore architectures, exploiting tightly-coupled parallelism has become increasingly important. Hume is a novel formally-motivated programming language oriented to developing software where strong assurance of resource use is paramount, in particular embedded architecture. Functional programming languages, such as Hume, are, in principle, well placed to take advantage of this trend, offering the ability to easily identify threads for parallelism in multicore architectures. Unfortunately, obtaining real performance benefits has often proved hard to realise in practice. This paper outlines the design and implementation of Hume for multicore architectures. It presents preliminary results which suggest that there is strong potential for seamless parallel gains in Hume programs. A key aspect of our approach is the use of a new and completely lock-free communication mechanism. Using this mechanism, we can obtain good parallel performance for suitable Hume programs, of up to 6.8 on eight cores.