Exploitation fine-grain parallelism in a combinator-based functional system

A Scheme to extend the lazy functional language SASL with an eager evaluation operator that allows the programmer to selectively identify expressions to be evaluated eagerly is developed. D.A. Turner´s (1979) abstraction and optimization algorithms are then modified so that the eagerness information will propagate through the combinator instruction set to the run-time parallel graph reducer. Simulation of simple benchmark programs shows this method to be very effective in exploiting fine-grain parallelism, even in irregular and unstructured operation. The evaluation is done on a virtual system. Despite the distributive nature of the combinator scheme, it is still unclear how to map the virtual machine into a physical architecture efficiently without seriously degrading the performance