Don Stewart

Beautiful Parallelism: Harnessing Multicores with Haskell

Multicore computers are here: is your programming language ready for it? Haskell is: you can take an off-the-shelf copy of GHC and write high performance parallel programs right now.

If you want to program a parallel machine, a purely functional language such as Haskell is a good choice: purity ensures the language is by-default safe for parallel execution, (whilst traditional imperative languages are by-default unsafe). This foundation has enabled Haskell to become something of a melting pot for high level approaches to concurrent and parallel programming, all available with an industrial strength compiler and language toolchain, available now for mainstream multicore programming.

This talk will introduce the features Haskell provides for writing high level parallel and concurrent programs. In particular we'll focus on lightweight semi-explicit parallelism, software transactional memory, and nested data parallelism, so you can go to work writing multicore programs in Haskell.

About Don Stewart

Don is an Australian open source hacker, and engineer at Galois, Inc, in Portland, Oregon, where he works on creating trustworthiness and assurance in critical systems, with an emphasis on language designand formal methods. Don is co-author of the award winning book, Real World Haskell (http://realworldhaskell.org), published by O'Reilly, and the XMonad window manager.

Time and Location

Saturday, October 17th at 4:00 PM in 1320 DCL