[Haskell] Implicit parallel functional programming

[Amanda Clare]

paul at theV.net wrote:

> Yes, today we have two-processors on a core, and uni-processor 
> speed bump is unlikely to overshadow the effort of parallelism 
> like it did 20 years ago. But we are also beginning to see
> applications requiring thousands of machines to run. The so
> called grid computing maybe a just another buzzword, but the
> reality is that grand applications just won't scale on today's
> two-processor core, and explicit parallelism often requires
> a prior knowledge on how to split the program, which is hardly
> scalable except some simple cases.

Re: the grid buzzword

Grid computing, as seen by organisations like the GGF and mainstream 
toolkits such as Globus, is not about parallelisation, but instead 
simply about access to shared resources. That is, they're interested in 
providing tools and standards for remote, shared access to software 
services, data and hardware (and providing useful features like 
security, authorisation, authentication, monitoring and reliability). Of 
course peer-to-peer compute systems are more about parallelisation, but 
they tend to be mostly commercial/proprietary rather than standardised 
at the moment.

The Grid will be more like an enhanced version of the current web. But 
Haskell could get involved there too, especially if styles such as web 
programming with continuations prove useful in future generations of web 
services architectures.

Amanda

-- 
Amanda Clare  http://users.aber.ac.uk/afc/
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB