The following paper might be interesting to users of ML who care about performance on current multicore hardware.
David C. J. Matthews and Makarius Wenzel. Efficient Parallel Programming in Poly/ML and Isabelle/ML. Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Declarative Aspects of Multicore Programming (DAMP 2010), co-located with POPL, Madrid, Spain, January 2010. To appear.
http://www4.in.tum.de/~wenzelm/papers/parallel-ml.pdf
Makarius