Parallel Haskell project underway

GHC HQ and Well-Typed are pleased to report that work has started on

the MSR-funded project to push the real-world use of parallel Haskell.

We will be working with four industrial partners over the next two

years, with the aim of demonstrating that parallel Haskell can be

employed successfully in industrial projects.

The participating organizations are:

* Dragonfly (New Zealand)

* IIJ Innovation Institute Inc. (Japan)

* Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA)

* Willow Garage Inc. (USA)

Each group is working on their own project, applying parallel Haskell

and their domain-specific expertise. In addition to providing advice

on Haskell tools and techniques, we will work with these partners to

identify and resolve any issues that are hindering progress. We are

prepared to handle issues covering anything from the compiler and

runtime system, through to platform, tool and library problems.

All the participants are working on complex, real-world problems. Three

projects involve scientific problems, and the fourth involves network

servers. Three of the projects are targeting single-node SMP systems,

while the fourth is targeting clusters. In two cases, Haskell will be

directly pitted against existing code written in C or C++.

Project progress reports will be posted to the Well-Typed blog [1]

and to the new Parallel Haskell mailing list [2].

[1]: http://www.well-typed.com/blog/

[2]: http://groups.google.com/group/parallel-haskell

== Dragonfly ==

http://www.dragonfly.co.nz/

Participants: Finlay Thompson, Edward Abraham

Cloudy Bayes: Hierarchical Bayesian modeling in Haskell

The Cloudy Bayes project aims to develop a fast Bayesian model

fitter that takes advantage of modern multiprocessor machines. It

will support model descriptions in the BUGS model description

language (WinBUGS, OpenBUGS, and JAGS). It will be implemented as

an embedded domain specific language (EDSL) within Haskell. A wide

range of model hierarchical Bayesian model structures will be

possible, including many of the models used in medical, ecological,

and biological sciences.

Cloudy Bayes will provide an easy to use interface for describing

models, running Monte Carlo Markov chain (MCMC) fitters, diagnosing

performance and convergence criteria as it runs, and collecting

output for post-processing. Haskell's strong type system will be

used to ensure that model descriptions make sense, providing a

fast, safe development cycle.

== IIJ Innovation Institute Inc. ==

http://www.iij-ii.co.jp/en/

Participants: Kazu Yamamoto

Haskell is suitable for many kinds of domain, and GHC's support for

lightweight threads makes it attractive for concurrency

applications. An exception has been network server programming

because GHC 6.12 and earlier have an IO manager that is limited to

1024 network sockets. The upcoming GHC 7 has a new IO manager

implementation that gets rid of this limitation.

This project will implement several network servers to demonstrate

that Haskell is suitable for network servers that handle a massive

number of concurrent connections.

== Los Alamos National Laboratory ==

http://www.lanl.gov/

Participants: Michael Buksas, Timothy M. Kelley

This project will use parallel Haskell to implement

high-performance Monte Carlo algorithms, a class of algorithms

which use randomness to sample large or otherwise intractable

solution spaces. The initial goal is a particle-based MC algorithm

suitable for modeling the flow of radiation, with application to

problems in astrophysics. From this, the project is expected to

move to identification of suitable abstractions for expressing a

wider variety of Monte Carlo algorithms, and using models for

different physical phenomena.

== Willow Garage ==

http://www.willowgarage.com/

Participants: Ryan Grant

Distributed Rigid Body Dynamics in ROS

Willow Garage seeks a high-level representation for a distributed

rigid body dynamics simulation, capable of excellent parallel

speedup on current and foreseeable hardware, yet linking to

existing optimized libraries for low-level message passing and

matrix math.

This project will drive API, performance, and profiling tool

requirements for Haskell's interface to the Message Passing

Interface (MPI) specification, an industry-standard in High

Performance Computing (HPC), as used on clusters of many nodes.

Competing internal initiatives use C++/MPI and CUDA directly.

Willow Garage aims to lay the groundwork for personal robotics

applications in everyday life. ROS (Robot Operating System -

ROS.org) is an open source, meta-operating system for your robot.