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

[Roman Leshchinskiy]

Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi
> 
>> I'm looking for interesting project to work on during Google Summer of
>>  Code. So I found [1]"A data parallel physics engine" ticket and got
>>  excited about it. I'd like to know interested mentors and community
>>  opinion about the complexity of such project.
> 
> I don't think there are a great deal of Haskell users who _really_
> need a physics engine right now.

Well, we do :-) The idea is to provide a good testbed for NDP with some 
real-world appeal and a certain coolness factor.

> Perhaps a nice direction to take this project would be to build an NDP
> matrix library first, then use that library to build a physics engine
> on top of it. A physics engine would certainly be very cool, and a
> parallel matrix library would certainly be very much in demand.

The problem with dense matrices is that they are regular and NDP isn't 
too good at handling regular data structures at the moment. Our main 
focus is on irregular stuff like sparse matrices, trees and so on. 
Still, we'll see what happens.

Roman