[Haskell-cafe] Parallel GHC project: new opportunity for an organisation to participate

[Duncan Coutts]

GHC HQ and Well-Typed are pleased to announce a new opportunity for an
organisation to take part in the Parallel GHC Project.

The project started in November 2010 with four industrial partners, and
consulting and engineering support from Well-Typed. Each organisation is
working on its own particular project making use of parallel Haskell.
The overall goal is to demonstrate successful use of parallel Haskell
and along the way to apply engineering effort to any problems with the
tools that the partner organisations might run into.

We have capacity to support another partner organisation for the
remaining duration of the project (at least another 12 months).
Organisations do not need to contribute financially but should be
prepared to make a significant commitment of their own time. Familiarity
with Haskell would be helpful, but Haskell expertise is not needed.
Partner organisations' choice of projects is similarly open-ended and
could be based on anything from pre-existing code bases to green field
endeavours.

We would welcome organisations interested in pure parallelism,
concurrency and/or distributed Haskell. Presently, two of our partner
organisations are using mainly pure parallelism and two are using
concurrency. What would be especially interesting for us is to diversify
this mix further by working with an organisation interested in making
use of of distributed Haskell, in particular the work highlighted in the
recent paper "Haskell for the Cloud" [1].

To help give an idea what participating in the Parallel GHC Project is
like, here is what some of what our current partner organisations have
to say:


        The Parallel GHC Project has enabled us to make steady progress
        towards our goals. Well-typed has provided support in the form
        of best practice recommendations, general engagement with the
        project, and directly coding up key components.

        I have been getting lots of help from Well-Typed, and enjoy
        our weekly meetings.
          -- Finlay Thompson, Dragonfly


        My organization is now trying to implement highly concurrent Web
        servers. After GHC 7 was released we faced several critical bugs
        in the new IO manager and one guy at Well-Typed kindly fixed all
        the bugs. This has been a big benefit for our organization.

        Another benefit is feedback/suggestions from Well-Typed.
        Well-Typed and our organization have meetings every other week
        and we report progress to each other. During the discussions, we
        can set the right direction to go in.
          -- Kazu Yamamoto, IIJ Innovation Institute Inc.


Well-Typed is coordinating the project, working directly with the
participating organisations and the Simons at GHC HQ. If you think your
organisation may be interested then get in touch with me via
info at well-typed.com

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/parallel/remote.pdf


-- 
Duncan Coutts, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/