Speaker: Dr. Patrick Maier from the University of Glasgow

Title: Why So Many? A Brief Tour of Haskell DSls for Parallel Programming

Abstract: The proliferation of parallel compute devices (multicore CPUs, GPGPUs,
manycore coprocessors) has increased the demand for parallel programming
languages. More specifically, it has increased the demand for parallel
extensions of existing languages, and a popular extension route has been
embedding a parallel DSL into a host language.

Haskell is known as a playground for programming language development, and also
offers good support for embedding DSLs (eg. type class overloading, Template
Haskell meta programming), so it is no surprise that there are several parallel
Haskell DSLs.

How many parallel Haskell DSLs are there? It is hard to say given the sprawling
nature of the Haskell community. Counting publications in major Haskell venues,
on average there were two new parallel DSLs per year over the last 5 years. This
diversity is daunting for novices, particularly for those who were lured to
Haskell by the promise that a pure functional language would make parallel
programming simpler.

In this talk, I will argue that the domain of parallel programming is too
diverse for there to exist a single unifying DSL. I will survey several parallel
Haskell DSLs to illustrate how programming paradigms (data vs task parallelism)
and parallel architectures (multicore vs GPGPU, shared vs distributed memory)
shape their designs.