Haskell Arrays Accelerated with GPUs | Hacker News Reader

Haskell Arrays Accelerated with GPUs

scribd.com

24 pointsdons12 comments

Dons, could you please stop linking to scribd.com? It's slow, it's bloated and it's overall an unusable pain whatever the platform you're trying to run it on.

You say that as if he's doing it habitually. So far as I can tell from the HN submissions list, he's done it exactly once to date. (And, on one other occasion, submitted a PDF link directly -- which of course HN adds a scribd link to in case, er, someone feels that they haven't visited scribd often enough lately. At least I assume that's why people use scribd links; I can't think of any other reason.)

He's also done it at least twice on Reddit in the past 3 days.

Though you're right that my wording was pretty awful. I'd edit and rephrase, but apparently I can't edit.

The author's now posted a blog post on this talk. Sorry for breaking the news early.

http://justtesting.posterous.com/haskell-arrays-accelerated-...

Original PDF link: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/accelerate.pdf (15MB)

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/accelerate

Unfortunately, it seems to be just a reference CPU implemetation, but if the GPU code is ever released, I'd guess it will be here.

Stunning. I had always thought scribd was the most annoying thing ever, but they revamped their UI and completely proved me wrong. Now, to actually get to the pdf (I don't run flash), I have to go to "classic view", click the download as pdf option, login, walk through about three pages of demands that I "give back" to scribd, and then I can actually get my pdf. It's always impressive when bad gets worse, I guess.

Why not just link to the actual content?

I'd be grateful if anyone could point me to the actual code for this. I'd like to give it a try for myself, but all I seem to be able to dig up is research papers.

The Haskell community is fond of mistaking research papers (in PDF!) for documentation, it's quite likely you've found all there is. Just as they are also fond of mistaking a list of function names and type signatures for documentation. (On good days, they may deign to add a sentence about what the function does.)

(Haskell guys, I love ya, but you have some of the oddest blind spots sometimes.)

It's too easy to tease, but I will try to resist.

But, seriously, they've been talking about this GPU work for upwards of a 1.5 years now. Usually we get something to play with, even if it's pretty badly broken (I'm thinking NDP here), so the lack of code here is pretty atypical. The accelerate link above is news to me, though, so that's helpful. Hope to see more soon!

* EDIT (to back up my 1.5 years claim):

earliest mention, May 15, 2008: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/svh/Slides/may-...

Chak's own work, Jan 10, 2009: http://www.citeulike.org/user/iff/article/3872848 http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/LCGK09.html

and, of course, accelerate ("reference implementation") was only released Aug 17, 2009: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/accelerate

I think it's because of overexposure to category theory. It gets to the point where they see a name, the see a type signature, they assume the developer isn't pathological, and figure out what they need.

It's on Hackage, as always, http://hackage.haskell.org/package/accelerate

Reply on news.ycombinator.com