[Haskell-cafe] Haskell and the Cell Processor

[Kazuya Sakakihara]

Glad to see others are interested in this topic.

2009/3/18 Galchin, Vasili <vigalchin at gmail.com>:
>      http://www.power.org/resources/devcorner/cellcorner   .... Is there
> project to port GHC to the Cell? Seems like a really cool challenge.

I am no GHC expert but...

Likely no as far as I searched back in a couple of months.  There is
(or was?) a SPU code generator written in Haskell, though.

The single most problem I guess is SPU can access only 256KB unless
you utilize DMA operations to transfer data to/from the main memory.
No idea how this can be supported in RTS.  This limitation might not
mesh well with GHC's heavy reliance on garbage collection.

Or if you take it as extreme software controllable cache memory, it
can be exploited for optimization.

Other parts of SPU than that can be handled in the same way as common
processors if you don't care optimization.

Kazuya