A parallel variant of ML using skeletons being developed (April 1994) as part of Tore Bratvold's PhD in the Department of Computing and Electronic Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. Programs are written in a subset of Standard ML, and parallelism is extracted from the use of certain higher-order functions. The SkelML compiler uses profiling information together with skeleton performance models to distinguish useful from non-useful parallelism. An important feature is the ability to perform transformations between skeletons to improve performance. Skeletons currently supported are map, filter, fold, pipe (implicitly extracted from function application) and various combinations of these. See also paraML. E-mail: Tore A Bratvold <tore@cee.hw.ac.uk>.

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