On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 11:31:53AM +1100, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
It's really only two things, as the GPU monad from the cited paper has been superseded by Data.Array.Accelerate — ie, the latter is a revision of the former. So, the code from the cited paper will eventually be released as a CUDA backend for D.A.Accelerate.
Oops, thanks for clarifying things up!
I would suggest that any GSoC project in this space should be based on D.A.Accelerate (rather than DPH), simply because the code base is much smaller and more accessible. There is not much point in writing a CUDA backend, as we already have a partially working one that we are going to release in due course. However, I repeatedly had people asking for an OpenCL backend. So, there appears to be some demand for that (and it's the right thing to do, given that CUDA is tied to a single company). An OpenCL backend for D.A.Accelerate also appears to be in the scope of what a good coder can achieve in the timeframe of a GSoC project. (To be precise, I think, a good coder can implement a working backend in that timeframe, but it will probably require more work to generate well optimised code.)
Thanks, that's very interesting. What about an LLVM backend, would it be useful? Perhaps it would be possible to use its vector operations to use SIMD instructions of modern CPUs (I think GHC isn't there yet, right?). This is just a thought :). Cheers! -- Felipe.