[Haskell-cafe] [GSoC] A data parallel physics engine

[Dan Piponi]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 2:33 PM, Andrew Coppin
<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:

>  Hanging around here, you really feel like you're at the cutting edge
>  of... something... heh.

Another approach isn't to target a CUDA back end for Haskell but to
write an array library that builds computations that can target a CUDA
(or other) back end. My first real world job that involved programming
was APL [1] based. APL (and its offspring) is a functional-ish
programming language that manipulates arrays using a relatively small
number of primitives, most of which probably map nicely to CUDA
hardware because of the potential for data parallelism. Despite the
write-only nature of APL source code, and the negative comments about
it by Dijkstra, the expressivity of APL for numerical work is
unbelievable. I would love to see some of those ideas somehow brought
into Haskell as a library.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29
--
Dan