2010/4/21 Aaron D. Ball :

I don't need a tool that automatically figures out how to distribute any workload in an intelligent way and handles all the communication for me.

You are right in general. Only if you want to rely on purity and a few source code annotations to get you parallelism relatively cheaply do you care about these compiler approaches. This is something that Haskell can do that Ruby, C and friends really can not do -- thus I mention it.

 If I have the basic building block, which is the ability to serialize a Haskell expression with its dependencies and read them into another Haskell instance where I can evaluate them, I can handle the other pieces, which are

- passing strings back and forth in whatever way is convenient - deciding how to divide up my workload.

Do add also, configuring servers and their connections.

In the Ruby universe, DRb combines the serialization and "passing strings around" job and lets me figure out how to divide up the work, and it would be delightful if there were something similarly simple in the Haskell world.

I think Holumbus has got some promising stuff for user-managed distributed workers: http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/trac/browser/distribution What do you think? -- Jason Dusek