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

[Dan Piponi]

On 8/30/07, Hugh Perkins <hughperkins at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?

Right. But the functions and data that we are trying to map and fold
could be anything, so we are required to have the full functionality
of Haskell running on the GPU - unless the compiler can smartly figure
out what should run on the GPU and what shouldn't. All in all, this
could be a fairly ambitious project.

Another, more modest, approach would be to define a DSL, maybe along
the lines of what Lennart Augustsson has been doing on his blog
(http://augustss.blogspot.com/), and implement a compiler back end
that generates GPU code from the DSL. Something similar for C++ is
Michael McCool's Sh library
(www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/s2005c37/ch07.pdf) which has now developed
into a more general purpose commercial product. It seems to me that
this could be a killer application for Haskell without a major rewrite
of the Haskell compiler. What's more, the same DSL could have
different back ends targeting GPUs, multiple cores or even just single
CPUs (where you'd still get the benefits of partial evaluation).
--
Dan