[Haskell-cafe] Haskell participating in big science like CERN Hadrian...

[Galchin, Vasili]

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:

> wchogg:
> > On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 5:47 AM, Dougal Stanton <dougal at dougalstanton.net>
> wrote:
> > > 2008/10/3 Galchin, Vasili <vigalchin at gmail.com>:
> > >> Hello,
> > >>
> > >>     One of my interests based on my education is "grand challenge
> science".
> > >> Ok .. let's take the  CERN Hadrian Accelerator.
> > >>
> > >>     Where do you think Haskell can fit into the CERN Hadrian effort
> > >> currently?
> > >>
> > >>     Where do you think think Haskell currently is lacking and will
> have to
> > >> be improved in order to participate in CERN Hadrian?
> > >
> > > Is that the experiment where Picts are accelerated to just short of
> > > the speed of light in order to smash through to the Roman Empire? ;-)
> > >
> > > I don't know what the main computational challenges are to the LHC
> > > researchers. The stuff in the press has mostly been about
> > > infrastructure --- how to store the gigabytes of data per second that
> > > they end up keeping, out of the petabytes that are produced in the
> > > first place (or something).
> >
> > Well, with the LHC efforts I don't think a technology like Haskell
> > really has a place...at least not now.  Even just a few years back,
> > when I worked on this stuff, we were still doing lots of simulation in
> > preparation for the actual live experiment and Haskell might have been
> > a good choice for some of the tools.  All of the detector simulation
> > was written in C++, because C++ is the new FORTRAN to physicists, and
> > you ain't seen nothing till you've seen a jury-rigged form of lazy
> > evaluation built into a class hierarchy in C++.  Now, would the C++
> > based simulation have run faster than a Haskell based one?  Quite
> > possibly.  On the other hand, I remember how many delays and problems
> > were caused by the sheer complexity of the codebase.  That's where a
> > more modern programming language might have been extremely helpful.
>
> How about EDSLs for producing high assurance controllers, and other
> robust devices they might need. I imagine the LHC has a good need for
> verified software components...

        ^^ totally agree on the "verified" Don.  Don, by controller do you
mean an I/O controller??

Vasili
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