[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hardware

[szefirov at ot.ru]

>> it seems that now we move right into this direction with GPUs
>
>
> I was just thinking that GPUs might make a good target for a reduction 
> language like Haskell. They are hugely parallel, and they have the 
> commercial momentum to keep them current. It also occurred to me that 
> the cell processor (in the Playstation 3) might also be a good target 
> considering its explicitly parallel architecture.

They are no good.

GPU's have no synchronisation between them which is needed for graph 
reduction. A delayed computation undergo several steps when created and 
actually computed/forced and we'd like to save effort.

Also, they are slow when dealing with memory accesses. Some are slow on 
conditional execution.

Take a look at BrookGPU: http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/brookgpu/

They have raytracer on GPU and it is SLOW because of high cost of tree 
traversal.