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Roman Cheplyaka have posted a short video demonstrating the physics engine in Haskell he is working on during his Summer of Code Project - Hphysics

YouTube direct link video

More information about progress on this project can be found on his blog: Building physics engine in Data Parallel Haskell

More: Hphysics project

Bryan O’Sullivan Lecture on writing programs in Haskell for multicore systems.

Bryan is is also a co-author of the upcoming O’Reilly book Real World Haskell

I use Eclipse to all sort of development on C, Java and Haskell. It gives me uniform look and feel on every project. In this post I wold like to show steps necessary to run Haskell Eclipse plug-in.

First of all you need to have Eclipse installed. I will use Ubuntu 8.10 and the installation command is:

My Eclipse version is: Europa 3.2.2, Haskell plug-in version is: 0.10.0 and Java version “1.6.0_06″

When the installation finish run Eclipse and select “Workbench” from initial page.

1. From menu on the top select: Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install ….
2. On “Install/Update” form select “Search for new features to Install”, click “Next”.
3. On “Install” form click “New Remote Site …”
4. On “Edit Remote Site” form enter:
   Name: Haskell Plug-in
   URL: http://eclipsefp.sf.net/updates

   - this is the location of Project that develops Functional Programming plug-in for Haskell and Ocaml. Click “OK”.

5. On “Install” form select check-box near the “Haskell Plug-in” if it is not already selected and click “Finish”

After the Installation is complete it may be necessary to restart Eclipse.

1. From menu go to: “Window”-> “Preferences…”
2. On “Preferences” form select “Functional Programming” and set appropriate compiler and editor options for you system.
3. On top right corner of Eclipse there is “Java perspective” that can be changed to “Haskell perspective”.

Enjoy happy programming.

Recently I become interested in GPU programming particularly technology developed by NVidia - CUDA. There is a lot of interesting examples provided with the SDK and a lot of demonstration links on the site. I have no vision if this will become mainstream in the future or other type of multi core technology, but I like the idea of cheap data parallel programming on video card. I have written some simple Monte Carlo programs to have a taste and my opinion is that I will use this technology only if there is compiler support from high level languages, especially functional ones. There is one project at Chalmers University (mentioned on the #haskell channel) that aims to provide backend for Haskell compiler. Programs are written in Haskell and executed on GPU-s.

Chalmers University:

PDF slides of presentation: “Obsidian: GPU programming in Haskell”

Authors pages:

http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~koen/

http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~ms/

Other thechnology that I am studing right now is Data Parallel Haskell. It is in process of development and gives great promises for parallel programming in Haskell and utilization of nested data parallelism. This will make possible to write programs that will scale well on massively parallel architectures composed of thousands and even hundred thousands computing cores.

And finally here is a short movie I found describing the usage of GPU “supercomputer” for tomographical reconstructions (7:30min). This shows the real value of such “exotic” computational technologies:

YouTube direct link video

Philip Wadler talk on “Faith, Evolution, and Programming Languages” (1h 7min)

Google direct link video