Tag: parallel

Multicore Haskell Now! ACM Reflections | Projections 2009

~ Don Stewart ~ 2 Comments

Here are the

on approaches to multicore programming in Haskell, presented at the ACM Reflections | Projections conference at the University of Illinois.

Abstract

Multicore computers are here: is your programming language ready for it? Haskell is: you can take an off-the-shelf copy of GHC and write high performance parallel programs right now.

If you want to program a parallel machine, a purely functional language such as Haskell is a good choice: purity ensures the language is by-default safe for parallel execution, (whilst traditional imperative languages are by-default unsafe). This foundation has enabled Haskell to become something of a melting pot for high level approaches to concurrent and parallel programming, all available with an industrial strength compiler and language toolchain, available now for mainstream multicore programming.

This talk will introduce the features Haskell provides for writing high level parallel and concurrent programs. In particular we’ll focus on lightweight semi-explicit parallelism, software transactional memory, and nested data parallelism, so you can go to work writing multicore programs in Haskell.

I’d like to thank Michael Ilseman, Sameer Sundresh and Jeff Green for their hospitality during my visit.

LACSS 2009: Domain Specific Languages and Haskell

~ Don Stewart ~ 4 Comments

Here are the

on the use of Haskell for constructing EDSLs for high performance computing, along with a 10 minute overview of Haskell support for multicore programming, presented at the LACSS 2009 Workshop on Non-Traditional Programming Models.

Abstract

As the complexity of large-scale computing architecture increases, the effort needed to program these machines efficiently has grown dramatically. The challenge is how to bridge this “programmability gap”, making the hardware more accessible to domain experts. We argue for an approach based on
executable embedded domain specific languages (EDSLs)—small languages with focused expressive power hosted directly in existing high-level programming languages such as Haskell. We provide examples of EDSLs in use in industry today, and describe the advantages EDSLs have over general purpose languages in productivity, performance, correctness and cost.