DPH and CUDA status

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Felipe Lessa:
>> I would suggest that any GSoC project in this space should be based
>> on D.A.Accelerate (rather than DPH), simply because the code base is
>> much smaller and more accessible.  There is not much point in
>> writing a CUDA backend, as we already have a partially working one
>> that we are going to release in due course.  However, I repeatedly
>> had people asking for an OpenCL backend.  So, there appears to be
>> some demand for that (and it's the right thing to do, given that
>> CUDA is tied to a single company).  An OpenCL backend for
>> D.A.Accelerate also appears to be in the scope of what a good coder
>> can achieve in the timeframe of a GSoC project.  (To be precise, I
>> think, a good coder can implement a working backend in that
>> timeframe, but it will probably require more work to generate well
>> optimised code.)
> 
> Thanks, that's very interesting.  What about an LLVM backend, would it
> be useful?  Perhaps it would be possible to use its vector operations
> to use SIMD instructions of modern CPUs (I think GHC isn't there yet,
> right?).  This is just a thought :).

I'm currently implementing an LLVM backend.  I'm not planning on using SIMD instructions in the first version, but it is an interesting idea for when a basic LLVM works.

Manuel