GHC HQ and Well-Typed are pleased to announce a new opportunity for an organisation to take part in the Parallel GHC Project.

The project started in November 2010 with four industrial partners, and consulting and engineering support from Well-Typed. Each organisation is working on its own particular project making use of parallel Haskell. The overall goal is to demonstrate successful use of parallel Haskell and along the way to apply engineering effort to any problems with the tools that the partner organisations might run into.

We have capacity to support another partner organisation for the remaining duration of the project (at least another 12 months). Organisations do not need to contribute financially but should be prepared to make a significant commitment of their own time. Familiarity with Haskell would be helpful, but Haskell expertise is not needed. Partner organisations' choice of projects is similarly open-ended and could be based on anything from pre-existing code bases to green field endeavours.

We would welcome organisations interested in pure parallelism, concurrency and/or distributed Haskell. Presently, two of our partner organisations are using mainly pure parallelism and two are using concurrency. What would be especially interesting for us is to diversify this mix further by working with an organisation interested in making use of of distributed Haskell, in particular the work highlighted in the recent paper "Haskell for the Cloud" (pdf).

To help give an idea what participating in the Parallel GHC Project is like, here is what some of what our current partner organisations have to say:

The Parallel GHC Project has enabled us to make steady progress towards our goals. Well-typed has provided support in the form of best practice recommendations, general engagement with the project, and directly coding up key components. I have been getting lots of help from Well-Typed, and enjoy our weekly meetings. ― Finlay Thompson, Dragonfly

My organization is now trying to implement highly concurrent Web servers. After GHC 7 was released we faced several critical bugs in the new IO manager and one guy at Well-Typed kindly fixed all the bugs. This has been a big benefit for our organization. Another benefit is feedback/suggestions from Well-Typed. Well-Typed and our organization have meetings every other week and we report progress to each other. During the discussions, we can set the right direction to go in. ― Kazu Yamamoto, IIJ Innovation Institute Inc.

Well-Typed is coordinating the project, working directly with the participating organisations and the Simons at GHC HQ. If you think your organisation may be interested then get in touch with me, Duncan Coutts, via info@well-typed.com.