[Haskell-cafe] Haskell on the Playstation 3? :-)

[Hugh Perkins]

On 8/30/07, Bulat Ziganshin <bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> it's the same as 8800GTX. please read CUDA manual first. these 128
> threads are not independent, each 8 or 16 threads execute the same
> code

Hmmmm, yes you are right.  The GPU contains 8 "multiprocessors", where
each multiprocessor contains multiple processors that execute the same
code at the same time ("data parallel").

There are 8 processors in each multiprocessor unit, which run at twice
the clock speed, so in one clock cycle they can execute 16 threads;
and in two clock cycles they can execute all 32 threads of a "warp"
(group of threads running the same code).

Sooo.... kindof an interesting architecture. To what extent do we
think that this is representative of future "general-purpose"
multi-core architectures?

Looking at Haskell parallelization, things like maps, and folds of
associative functions can be split across the threads of a single
warp.  On the other hand, things like independent lets that we want to
run in parallel would need to be assigned to independent warps.

On the whole, maps and folds may constitute the bulk of what we are
trying to parallelize (certainly, SPJ's NDP focuses extensively on
maps), so this is probably broadly compatible with the CUDA
architecture?