SAPLING 071

Notes on SAPLING 071

11 presentations on programming languages, each running 20-25 minutes. About half the presenters were PhD students, the other half professors, or recent PhD grads. Most presentations used Haskell in one way or another.

One talk I particularly enjoyed was 'Generative Code Specialisation for High-Performance Monte-Carlo Simulations'. In this, a DSL for expressing chemistry problems was built in Haskell. The performance for the simulation was slow, so they wrote a code generator to convert the DSL in C. The C code was then compiled and called from the Haskell program. The grid management was done in Haskell as well.

Another interesting talk was on implementing a DSL using Stratego. [Stratego/XT] aims to make it easier to transform programs from one representation to another.

One presentation was on using GPUs to do vector operations using a framework called CUDA. As MHz rates taper off and parallelism increases this may become a more viable field. Today, you can run a program with essentially 512 threads on a single GPU. Unfortunately, few programs can be adapted to take advantage of this architecture.

Lastly, parking at Macquarie University is a major pain. Be sure to bring $10 in coins for a day's parking or ride the bus.