Thinking about ICFP'98 programming contest...

Thinking about ICFP'98 programming contest...

[Norman Davis]

[French]
Excuse moi, je ne parle pas Francais.
(I hope the above translates into "Excuse me please, I don't speak French")

[English]

I've been thinking about the ICFP'98 programming contest which will be judged
on a "four-processor 150MHz Pentium-Pro box with 128 mbytes of memory running
Linux SMP". I'm wondering if anyone can tell me:

1) Do I need to do anything in particular or organize my program in a certain
way for me to take advantage of the multiple processors? Do I need to seperate
my program into multiple threads or processes? Are there any special calls I
must invoke or libraries I must utilize.

2) Beyond that, what do I need to do to take advantage of parallelism. 
Here is a quote from the web site : http://www.ai.mit.edu/extra/icfp-contest/

>On Thursday, August 27, 1998, a challenge task will be posted
>on the Internet. Teams will have 72 hours to implement a
>program to perform this task and submit this program to the 
>contest judges. The judges will perform a competition among 
>the submitted programs on a four-processor 150MHz Pentium-Pro 
> box with 128 mbytes of memory running Linux SMP. 

>Although the precise task chosen will not be revealed until
>the contest begins, performance matters. Algorithm 
>cleverness matters. We have specifically chosen a parallel 
>machine for the contest so that programs may exploit 
>parallelism. Programming languages that help programmers 
>to rapidly construct complex systems may allow contestants 
>to attempt particularly sophisticated implementations in 
>the 72 hours allotted for programming. 

Thanks.

  Norman Davis
  ndavis@ti.com

Re: Thinking about ICFP'98 programming contest...

[Xavier Leroy]

> I've been thinking about the ICFP'98 programming contest which will be judged
> on a "four-processor 150MHz Pentium-Pro box with 128 mbytes of memory running
> Linux SMP". I'm wondering if anyone can tell me:
> 
> 1) Do I need to do anything in particular or organize my program in
> a certain way for me to take advantage of the multiple processors?
> Do I need to seperate my program into multiple threads or processes?
> Are there any special calls I must invoke or libraries I must
> utilize.

The threads library in OCaml cannot exploit more than one processor
(due to GC and runtime system issues).  So, you need to split your
program in several processes communicating via e.g. pipes or sockets.
There are several functionalities that makes this realtively easy: one
is output_value/input_value, which let you transfer almost any data
structure between two Caml processes in one call.  You might also look
at the Caml-MPI and Caml-PVM interfaces that have been announced on
this mailing list a while back.  These will provide a higher-level
communication layer than pipes and sockets.

> 2) Beyond that, what do I need to do to take advantage of parallelism. 

I don't know what to answer except the obvious "parallelize your program"...

Good luck for the contest,

- Xavier Leroy