Just to provide a bit more information: although this is an academic paper it may be of interest to users of Poly/ML. There are some details about the implementation of multi-threading in Poly/ML and descriptions of the "futures" code in Isabelle that Makarius wrote on top of the Thread structure. There's also some rather impressive speed-up graphs on multi-core machines showing that it all really works in practice!
David
Makarius wrote:
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