The Manticore project is an effort to design and implement a new language for parallel programming. Our primary motivation is to move parallel programming out of its traditional application areas, such as Scientific Computing, and into a broader range of applications running on commodity hardware. To achieve that goal, Manticore is a heterogeneous language that supports parallelism at multiple levels. We start with a strict functional core (essentially a mutation-free subset of SML) and extend it with both fine-grain implicitly-threaded parallel constructs and course-grain explicit concurrency. To support heterogeneous parallelism, we have developed a novel scheduling architecture. This talk will give an overview of the project, describe our scheduling infrastructure, and discuss some of the aspects of the implementation.
John Reppy has been studying issues in language design and implementation for twenty years. His work includes the invention of Concurrent ML, co-inventor of the Moby programming language, major contributions to the Standard ML of New Jersey system, and co-editing of the Standard ML Basis Library specification. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1992 and worked at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill for eleven years. He is currently a Professor at the University of Chicago.