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From: kh@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Kevin Hammond)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional
Subject: Re: State of GRIP?
Summary: GRIP is alive and well
Message-ID: <7808@vanuata.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Date: 16 Feb 91 16:50:02 GMT
References: <2636@opal.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Organization: Computing Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland
Lines: 54

In article <2636@opal.cs.tu-berlin.de> wg@opal.cs.tu-berlin.de writes:
>What is the current state of GRIP? Is it still alive? 

GRIP is up and running LML and Haskell programs, after a hiatus when
it was being moved to Glasgow.  We've recently been getting some
performance results which are quite exciting, e.g.:

	Fine-grained parallelism can be very nearly as good
	as coarse-grained parallelism [Nijmegen];

	GRIP is insensitive to LIFO/FIFO spark pool throttling
	strategies [PDCS].

>Does the machine tends to a product-quality fixpoint? 

We use the Spineless Tagless G-Machine for *fast* graph reduction.
The hardware is generally very sound (no machine faults detected for
over 6 months).  The software is still under development, but is
improving in quality.  I have run decent-sized functional programs
(1000-2000 line programs) on the machine [but no large-scale results
have been published yet, maybe FPCA?].

>Is there a user community? 

Yes, there is a project (FLARE) which is aimed at exploiting GRIP for
real applications, and we have a (small) number of local users.  But
it's really not yet in a state where we could throw it open to all
comers.

> Are there other applications then classical graph 
>reduction? Hints are very appreciated.

The BRAVE project at Essex is using the GRIP hardware to implement a 
parallel logic programming language.  The hardware and OS are essentially
general purpose (though you might have to remicrocode the IMUs for a new
application area).

Kevin

[Nijmegen]	Hammond, K. and Peyton Jones, S.L., "Some Early Experiments
		with the GRIP Parallel Reducer", Proc. Workshop on
		Implementation of Functional Languages on Parallel
		Architectures, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, June 1990.
		Technical Report no 90-16, October 1990,
		Dept of Informatics, University of Nijmegen.

[PDCS]		Hammond, K. and Peyton Jones, S.L., "Profiling Scheduling
		Strategies on GRIP", submitted to the Journal of
		Parallel and Distributed Computing, 1991.

I can make PostScript versions of either of these papers available if
you're interested.
-- 
This Signature Intentionally Left Blank.	E-mail: kh@cs.glasgow.ac.uk