GHC HQ and Well-Typed are very pleased to announce a 2-year project funded by Microsoft Research to push the real-world adoption and practical development of parallel Haskell with GHC. We are seeking organisations to take part: read on for details.

In the last few years GHC has gained impressive support for parallel programming on commodity multi-core systems. In addition to traditional threads and shared variables, it supports pure parallelism, software transactional memory (STM), and data parallelism. With much of this research and development complete, and more on the way, the next stage is to get the technology into more widespread use.

This project aims to do the engineering work to solve whatever remaining practical problems are blocking organisations from making serious use of parallelism with GHC. The driving force will be the applications rather than the technology.

We will work in partnership with a small number of commercial or scientific users who are keen to make use of parallel Haskell. We will work with these partners to identify the issues, major or minor, that are hindering progress. The project is prepared to handle system issues, covering everything from compiler and runtime system through to more mundane platform and tool problems. Meanwhile our partners will contribute their domain-specific expertise to use parallel Haskell to address their application.

We are now seeking organisations to take part in this project. Organisations do not need to contribute financially but should be prepared to make a significant commitment of their own time. We expect to get final confirmation of the project funding in June and to start work shortly thereafter.

Well-Typed will coordinate the project, working directly with both 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.