About Eden

Eden has been jointly developed by two groups at Philipps Universität Marburg, Germany and Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. The project has been ongoing since 1996. Currently, the team consists of the following people:

in Madrid:

Ricardo Peña, Yolanda Ortega-Mallén, Mercedes Hidalgo, Fernando Rubio, Clara Segura, Alberto Verdejo

in Marburg:

Rita Loogen, Jost Berthold, Mischa Dieterle, Thomas Horstmeyer, Oleg Lobachev, Johannes May

Eden extends Haskell with a small set of syntactic constructs for explicit process specification and creation. While providing enough control to implement parallel algorithms efficiently, it frees the programmer from the tedious task of managing low-level details by introducing automatic communication (via head-strict lazy lists), synchronisation, and process handling.

Eden's main constructs are process abstractions and process instantiations. The function process :: (a -> b) -> Process a b embeds a function of type (a -> b) into a process abstraction of type Process a b which, when instantiated, will be executed in parallel. Process instantiation is expressed by the predefined infix operator ( # ) :: Process a b -> a -> b. Higher-level coordination is achieved by defining skeletons, ranging from a simple parallel map to sophisticated replicated-worker schemes. They have been used to parallelise a set of non-trivial benchmark programs.

Survey and standard reference

Rita Loogen, Yolanda Ortega-Mallén and Ricardo Peña: Parallel Functional Programming in Eden, Journal of Functional Programming 15(3), 2005, pages 431-475.