Abstract: In this paper we prove time and space bounds for the implementation of the programming language NESL on various parallel machine models. NESL is a sugared typed lambda-calculus with a set of array primitives and an explicit parallel map over arrays. Our results extend previous work on provable implementation bounds for functional languages by considering space and by including arrays. For modeling the cost of NESL we augment a standard call-by-value operational semantics to return two cost measures: a DAG representing the sequential dependences in the computation, and a measure of the space taken by a sequential implementation. We show that a NESL program with w work (nodes in the DAG), d depth (levels in the DAG), and s sequential space can be implemented on a p processor butterfly network, hypercube, or CRCW PRAM using O(w/p + d log p) time and O(s + d p log p) reachable space. For programs with sufficient parallelism these bounds are optimal in that they give linear speedup and use space within a constant factor of the sequential space.
Note that this online version corrects some typographical errors, mostly in Figure 8.
@inproceedings {BLELLOCH96nesl,
author = "Guy~E. Blelloch and John Greiner",
title = "A Provable Time and Space Efficient Implementation of NESL",
booktitle = "ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming",
year = 1996,
month = may,
pages = "213--225"}