[Haskell-cafe] Haskell good for parallelism/concurrency on manycore?

[Ahn, Ki Yung]

Dear Haskellers,

I just got an inquiry from a research department head
of a Korean company seriously considering to adopt
functional languages because they heard that functional
languages can do good at parallel programming on manycore
platforms.

They want to know what technologies out there implemented
in functional languages, such as Erlang or Haskell, that
can help them write more maintainable programs that are
better at utilizing parallelism and avoiding bugs related
to synchronization. They are also very interested in Cilk,
as well as Haskell or Erlang.

My first thought is that maybe Cilk would work better for
them just because it would not be easy to recruit Erlang or
Haskell programmers experienced in network, security, or
concurrent/parallel programming.  I myself can answer basic
inquiries such as what libraries to look for to implenent
such and so, but not able to give advice on large scale
projects such as unified security solution package. So,
it wouldn't be practical form them to launch a project
without inviting an Erlang or Haskell expert in their domain
as a project manager from overseas, which I don't think they
are very willing to do.

Are there Haskell consultants or Haskell experts on this
subject, who believes that Haskell based approach might work
better for them, or Haskell can be useful along with other
approaches (e.g. DSL, prototyping, formal modeling of policies)?
If so, I would like to recommend them trying contact you, and try
my best to help communicating with them, if needed.  They know
English, of course, but may not be familiar with functional
programming orlanguage-oriented programming jargons such as DSLs,
oops, I mean language middleware :-)


For your information:

The company is a network security company whose main products
are VPN and firewall appliances and their management software.
Their research department is in search of better technologies
to implement their future UTM (unified threat management)
solutions utilizing the manycore platforms.

In Korea, there are some research groups and few companies
using OCaml, but almost no Erlang or Haskell communities.
This company is preferring local researchers or consultants
for advice or consulting, but there's no local group using
Haskell seriously, as far as I know, even in research yet.
That's why this person contacted me, just because I wrote
a small tutorial on Haskell Server Programming while ago.


P.S. If you happen to be a local Korean expert on this matter, sorry for
my ignorance, and I'd be happy to forward their inquiry to you!

--
Ahn, Ki Yung