Constructing Skeletons in Clean The Bare Bones

Skeletons are well-suited to structure parallel programming. They allow the easy use of some well-known parallel programming paradigms to construct portable, efficient programs. Much research has been focused on the use of skeletons in functional programming languages, because they can be expressed elegantly as higher order functions. On the other hand, little attention has been paid to an elementary weakness of skeletons: how to implement them. In this paper we will show that functional languages with some low level constructs for parallelism can be used to efficiently implement a range of high level skeletons. We will construct skeletons for data parallelism, for parallel I/O, and for stream processing. Our experiments demonstrate that no performance penalty needs to be paid, compared to more restrictive solutions.