Been a while since I've done Haskell, but the essential breakdown as I understand it is this:
At lowest level you have the Control.Concurrent primitives: forkIO and MVar. forkIO allows you to spin up new Haskell threads (not OS threads) and MVar's can be used to communicate between them. MVar's can be empty or full and block when the operation can't be completed immediately (writing to a full MVar or reading from an empty MVar). They also have single wakeup semantics, so if you have multiple readers blocking on an empty MVar read, only one will be woken up when someone writes to it.
STM has transactional semantics. You can write to multiple STM variables atomically in a transaction, and your transaction will restart if any of your input variables have been written to while your transaction was running. Useful if you need to maintain consistency between several variables at all times.
Async is a wrapper around STM and provides common functions you would often write yourself to express common patterns, but more battle tested.
Strategies are about optimistically evaluating Haskell thunks in parallel. For example if you map a function over a list, now you have a list of thunks. You can use Strategies to now evaluate those thunks in parallel. Key thing with Strategies is that if you remove them from your code (or use a non-threaded runtime) it doesn't affect the semantics of your program, it just might make it slower due to loss of parallel evaluation.
The Par Monad isn't used much, but the key idea there is you build an explicit dependency graph of the values in your computation and the runtime tries to parallelize the nodes in the graph that it can. Similar to what make does if you run it with -j.
At lowest level you have the Control.Concurrent primitives: forkIO and MVar. forkIO allows you to spin up new Haskell threads (not OS threads) and MVar's can be used to communicate between them. MVar's can be empty or full and block when the operation can't be completed immediately (writing to a full MVar or reading from an empty MVar). They also have single wakeup semantics, so if you have multiple readers blocking on an empty MVar read, only one will be woken up when someone writes to it.
STM has transactional semantics. You can write to multiple STM variables atomically in a transaction, and your transaction will restart if any of your input variables have been written to while your transaction was running. Useful if you need to maintain consistency between several variables at all times.
Async is a wrapper around STM and provides common functions you would often write yourself to express common patterns, but more battle tested.
Strategies are about optimistically evaluating Haskell thunks in parallel. For example if you map a function over a list, now you have a list of thunks. You can use Strategies to now evaluate those thunks in parallel. Key thing with Strategies is that if you remove them from your code (or use a non-threaded runtime) it doesn't affect the semantics of your program, it just might make it slower due to loss of parallel evaluation.
The Par Monad isn't used much, but the key idea there is you build an explicit dependency graph of the values in your computation and the runtime tries to parallelize the nodes in the graph that it can. Similar to what make does if you run it with -j.