MSR funding a 2-year project to mature Parallel Haskell for commercial users

http://blog.well-typed.com/2010/04/parallel-haskell-2-year-project-to-push-real-world-use/

by dons • 16 years ago

60 17 16 years ago

blog.well-typed.com

pln• 16 years ago

This is really cool. Kudos, Microsoft.

thu2• 16 years ago

This is Microsoft Research; I believe it's not really the Microsoft behind Windows and co.

lincolnq2• 16 years ago

It is admirable that Microsoft has a research department and that they are willing to publish their work. Not many companies can say the same.

awa• 16 years ago

They are run by the same management, the money for MSR really comes from sales of Windows and Office, and most research done is to explore future features of MS products

chollida1• 16 years ago

> This is Microsoft Research; I believe it's not really the Microsoft behind Windows and co.

I'm curious as to what you mean with this statement, given that Microsoft Research is a part of Microsoft.

LiveTheDream• 16 years ago

Great to see major investments in moving programming languages forward.

Periodic• 16 years ago

I have a few friends who program largely in C++ or in interpreted languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl. They've scoffed at my love of Haskell, claiming it's too academic and overly complex and that they'd rather just get things done.

Just last week I asked them what piece of software was missing from their lives in an attempt to get ideas for a new project to start. One of the first things on all their lists was software that would automatically parallelize an algorithm for them. Inwardly I wanted to put palm to face because the easy parallelization in Haskell is one of the killer features I'd been trying to convince them of.

I think the major barrier to adoption is lack of real-world results to show people that's viable. All the benchmarks in the world won't convince these people to change their ways, but if they see other people using it to good effect, they will seriously consider it.

runT1ME• 16 years ago

I wasn't aware Haskell had good multi-threaded support.

How is Haskell better at auto-parallelizing an algorithm compared to say, java's fork/join or .NET's equivalent?

lincolnq2• 16 years ago

Haskell's tools mostly have the same sort of power as forkjoin (scheduling work to be done on separate threads; creating the right number of threads based on the hardware; providing an easy-to-use set of functions that call for work to be done in parallel).

The major difference is that the tools compose with the language better. Instead of having to keep "I'm working in a multicore environment" in your head all the time when you're writing your client code (as you would in Java, worrying about concurrent mutation and so on), Haskell enforces immutability throughout the language. Often you get the extremely convenient situation where you observe that something could be parallelized, change map to pmap and you're now using all your cores.

Psyonic• 16 years ago

Its mainly the language that makes the difference. By having such a strict type system, the language can know for sure that something is safe to parallelize.

chc• 16 years ago

A large part of Haskell's strength in this regard comes because it is a pure functional language, so neither the programmer nor the parallelism library has to worry much about side effects. This both makes it easier to parallelize more code and it can make the parallelism more efficient in some cases (since Haskell isn't operating in an environment designed for mutability).

eru3• 16 years ago

> [...] interpreted languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl [...]

Just to nitpick: Haskell can be interpreted as well, see Hugs. And Python commonly gets compiled to byte-code. (I have no idea how Ruby and Perl implementations work.)

ganley• 16 years ago

Almost exactly 20 years ago, I started my grad-school research on this very topic: auto-parallelizing Haskell. Shortly, though, my advisor left and I had to choose a new advisor and a new research topic. It's been surreal to see Haskell suddenly (it seems) get so popular lately, and now to see a commercial push for the very thing I was going to work on is very cool. It's incredible that it's taken so long, but better late than never.

MSR funding a 2-year project to mature Parallel Haskell for commercial users

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