John Ericson
Yes, see https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/Plan-for-increased-parallelism-an... where we (Obsidian) and IOHK have been planning together.
I must saw, I am a bit skeptical about a GSOC being able to take this on successfully. I thought Fendor did a great job with multiple home units, for example, but we have still to finish merging all his work! The driver is perhaps the biggest cesspool of technical debt in GHC, and it will take a while to untangle let alone implement new features.
I forget what the rules are for more incremental or multifaceted projects, but I would prefer an approach of trying to untangle things with no singular large goal. Or maybe we can involve a student with efforts to improve CI, attacking the root cause for why it's so hard to land things in the first place .
I think this would be ill-suited to a GSoC project. GSoC projects are strongly encouraged to be measurable projects with a clear development trajectory from the outset and multiple concrete checkpoints. If we want the project to be successful I think it would be a mistake to wander from this guidance. Cheers, - Ben