[Haskell-cafe] optimising for vector units

[Ketil Malde]

MR K P SCHUPKE <k.schupke at imperial.ac.uk> writes:

> Well I have to say the dataflow style of lazy programming made me think
> Haskell would be ideal for multi-processor use (and now HyperThreading
> is common most PCs have more than one processor from the code's point
> of view)...

> I was disappointed to find GHC only uses one thread, and therefore will
> only use one CPU.

I'm sure somebody, somewhere, is working on speculative execution of
Haskell code.  Now that Sun is building Niagara with IIRC 8 cores on a
chip, Intel is rumoured to put up to 16 cores on the post-Montecito
Tukwila, Sony/IBM's Cell is said to be some kind of parallel design,
and every self-respecting chip vendor is putting at least two cores on
a chip and/or adding multithreaded cores.

Even if there's a lot of rumor-mongering going on, it seems fairly
clear that you can only go on for so long, adding more cache to your
old designs, and the bottleneck then becomes the inherent parallelism
in your code.

One would expect a lazy and pure language to be excellent for
parallelization, since the programmer is generally removed from the
actual flow of execution anyway.  At some point (for some n), being
able to spawn n threads will gain you more than a factor c constant
overhead, and Haskell programs, with a run-time system that can
evaluate expressions in paralllel, will outperform single threaded C
code. 

(But it probably isn't that simple, or we would have it already :-)

-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants