Parallel machines are now affordable and available to many users in the form of small symmetric shared-memory multiprocessors (SMPs). Unfortunately, programming practices have not kept pace with this hardware advance. The vast majority of developers still write applications in sequential programming languages that do not exploit multiple processors. The traditional approaches for adding parallelism to applications are prone to introducing new, strange, and difficult-to-eliminate bugs. In this important new text, the authors offer a completely different vision of the future, where parallel programming is the default and sequential programming is a special case. The foundation of this vision is an implicitly parallel programming language, pH, which is the result of two decades of research by the authors. A dialect and extension of the standard nonstrict and purely functional language Haskell, pH is essentially Haskell with implicitly parallel semantics. pH's extensions to Haskell comprise a disciplined approach to shared parallel state, so that a pH program-even a beginner's program-is implicitly parallel. The authors have developed this text over ten years while teaching implicit parallel programming to graduate students at MIT and specialized short courses to undergraduates and software professionals in the U.S., Japan, and India.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 From Sequential to Implicit Parallel Programming Chapter 2 Functions and Reduction Chapter 3 Types and Type Checking Chapter 4 Rewrite Rules, Reduction Strategies, and Parallelism Chapter 5 Tuples and Algebraic Product Types Chapter 6 Lists and Algebraic Sum Types Chapter 7 Arrays: Fast Indexed Data Structures Chapter 8 Sequencing, Input/Output, and Side Effects Chapter 9 I-structures Chapter 10 M-structures: Mutable Synchronized State Chapter 11 Conclusion Appendix A An Introduction to the for pH