Compiling functional languages for SIMD architectures

A major impediment to the wider proliferation of Single-Instruction, Multiple Datastream (SIMD) [3] architectures rests in the unsuitability of sequential, scalar, languages for programming data-parallel systems. Existing languages lack sufficient expressive power to describe data-parallel computation. A functional language, extended with data-parallel primitives, provides a powerful abstraction of the capabilities of SIMD architectures. Such a language conveys the following benefits: greater expressive power, a rich set of data-types, transparent access to data-parallelism, amenability to program transformation and consistency with the functional style. A compilation strategy onto an abstract SIMD architecture is presented