Custom Query (117 matches)

Reported by malcolm.wallace@…, 6 years ago.

IBM's Cell processor architecture consists of a PowerPC processing unit plus eight secondary processing units on the same chip. Each secondary processor has its own separately-addressable on-chip memory, as well as access to main memory through DMA. The secondary processors are connected together with a common bus that is designed for high data throughput.

The hardware architecture immediately suggests a couple of nice possible mappings from Haskell. One idea is that each processor could run a separate function in a composition pipeline, with the compositions themselves being represented simply by communication along the main bus.

Another idea is to allocate explicit concurrent threads amongst the processors, so they run asynchronously apart from communication through MVars. The tricky things here are that (a) the secondary processors have a different instruction set from the main processor, and (b) they have very fast non-shared memory, so separate heaps might be sensible.

Interested mentors

• Malcolm Wallace (@ cs.york.ac.uk)

Interested students

• Michele Catasta <mcatasta@…>

Reported by malcolm.wallace@…, 6 years ago.

The Cabal framework for installing library packages is very useful. But it only works for ghc and Hugs. Lots of the internal code has stubs for nhc98, but no-one has ever filled them in. Yhc is not even mentioned in the code. The idea of the project would be to do everything necessary for Cabal to support these two (quite similar) compilers.

Reported by michael@…, 7 years ago.

Allegro < http://alleg.sf.net> is a very capable C-library for games development. It does everything from packed files to sound to graphics. The way the library is set up makes it a good target for a haskell binding.

OpenGL can interact with Allegro through allegroGL. this could be added as well if time allows.

Difficulity: Low but potentially much work. Will learn FFI, potentially c2hs and some about games programming