[Haskell-cafe] (Off-topic) CUDA

[Malcolm Wallace]

>> (Also... Haskell on the GPU. It's been talked about for years, but  
>> will
>> it ever actually happen?)
>
> gpu is just set of simd-like instructions. so the reason why you will
> never see haskell on gpu is the same as why you will never see it
> implemented via simd instructions :D

Because SIMD/GPU deals only with numbers, not pointers, you will not  
see much _symbolic_ computation being offloaded to these arithmetic  
units.  But there are still great opportunities to improve Haskell's  
speed at numerics using them.  And some symbolic problems can be  
encoded using integers.

There are at least two current (but incomplete) projects in this area:  
Sean Lee at UNSW has targetted Data Parallel Haskell for an Nvidia  
GPGPU, and Joel Svensson at Chalmers is developing a Haskell-embedded  
language for GPU programming called Obsidian.

Regards,
     Malcolm