Just Testing

Aug
22nd

Sun

Second beta release for the CUDA backend of Accelerate

The second beta release of Data.Array.Accelerate (version 0.8.0.0) includes support for all array operations in the CUDA backend — except for a new stencil operation that is new in this release and currently only supported by the interpreter. The CUDA backend requires CUDA 3.x and has been tested on consumer-grade GeForce cards, TESLA high-performance GPUs, and the new Fermi cards.

If you are interested in general-purpose GPU programming in Haskell, give this release a spin — it is available on Hackage. While it is far from perfect, it should already prove useful for a considerable range of applications. Together with the other Accelerate developers, I would be very interested to hear what works for you and what doesn’t. We are also interested in suggestions for the future development of the library. Accelerate has a mailing list and a bug tracker on which we also accept feature requests.

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Jul
19th

Mon

First release of the CUDA backend for Accelerate

During the first Australian Haskell Hackathon, AusHac2010, we finally managed to complete the integration of the CUDA backend, written by Sean Lee and Trevor McDonell, into the array EDSL Accelerate. It still doesn’t cover the complete functionality of the current version of the Accelerate EDSL, but already allows for interesting GPU computations. The package source (version 0.7.1.0) can be obtained from Hackage as usual. There is now also a bug tracker.

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Jul
17th

Sat

Singleton: A general-purpose dependently-typed assembly language

In the paper Singleton: A general-purpose dependently-typed assembly language, we introduce Singleton, a typed assembly language that embeds a variant of the calculus of inductive constructions (CiC) as an assertion language in its type system. Moreover, Singleton procedures can abstract over propositions and proof terms. Singleton’s name comes form its support for generalised singleton types that allow the values from arbitrary inductive types to be associated with the contents of registers and memory locations. Together these features allow strong statements to be made about the functional behaviour of Singleton programs.

Singleton’s development was motivated by the desire for a typed assembly language that can establish high-level properties that are not implied by type safety alone, a requirement that we encountered in the context of runtime verification. For more details on that context, see our previous papers Secure Untrusted Binaries - Provably! and On the automated synthesis of proof-carrying temporal reference monitors.

Simon Winwood, on whose PhD work the paper is based, established basic properties of Singleton’s type system, namely type safety and a type erasure property, using the Coq proof assistant: proof scripts.

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Jul
7th

Wed

Haskell 2010 is complete!

The final version of the Haskell 2010 edition has been released: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2010-July/022189.html This completes my stewardship of the Haskell foreign function interface specification. It is now part of the language standard proper. The next language feature I personally like to see being integrated are type families, but that still requires much work.

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Jun
15th

Tue

New paper: An LLVM Backend For GHC

In An LLVM Backend For GHC, we describe the design and implementation of an LLVM backend for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). We outline the conceptual obstacles that we had to overcome and give a detailed performance analysis of the new backend compared to the existing C backend and native code generator.

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Jun
7th

Mon

One week with iPad

When I decided to by an iPad, I had one killer application in mind: reading. I was hoping the device would also be useful otherwise, but cutting down on printing papers and the like was my main aim. As a researcher, I inevitably read a lot: research papers, books, reports, manuals, thesis drafts, the drafts of my own work-in-progress papers, and so on. I have got reading material on my desk at home, in my office, in my bag…it’s a mess. The prospect of consolidating it all into one device, which would hopefully also cover most of my note taking and sketching out of ideas, was enough to sell me on the iPad.

So, how did it work out? So far, very well — but slightly more than a week of use makes it hard to draw any final conclusions. The printed area of a paper is about the same as the size of the iPad screen, which combined with the high quality of the display makes for a good reading experience. Instead of printing a paper or other document I like to read, I now sync it to my iPad —usually using Dropbox— and read it with GoodReader for iPad. If I expect that I may want to refer to a paper at a later time, I’m adding it to my mobile library kept in Papers. If I need to annotate a document —for example, for a review— I currently use iAnnotate PDF. I like Dropbox, GoodReader, and Papers, but I’m only using iAnnotate as there doesn’t seem to be an alternative at the moment — the user interface is pretty rough.

In addition, I found over the last week that iPad is also the perfect Twitter device (I’m currently using Twitterific for iPad), and great for reading blogs and online articles, which I often file away for later reading on my iPad using Instapaper.

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May
17th

Mon

GHC LLVM backend work makes it onto the LLVM Project Blog

David Terei wrote a post for the LLVM project blog summarising the motivation and experiences from his Honours project. The blog post contains a nice summary of the GHC LLVM backend project and quotes some new benchmark results.

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May
7th

Fri

Simon Peyton Jones on Data Parallel Haskell

Simon Peyton Jones recently got stranded in Boston due to Eyjafjallajokul. He took the opportunity to give a talk about our joint Data Parallel Haskell project at Northeastern University. The Northeastern folks kindly recorded and published the talk. The talk provides a nice summary of our approach.

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Apr
24th

Sat

jballer: Gizmodo's Trade Secret Liability

A number of sources have turned to Ian Betteridge’s thoughtful analysis of the Gizmodo saga. I believe that, because he failed to address California law, Ian was too quick to dismiss the possibility of trade secret claims by Apple. As Ian points out, Federal law requires “reasonable…

Apr
6th

Tue

Regular, shape-polymorphic, parallel arrays in Haskell

The paper Regular, shape-polymorphic, parallel arrays in Haskell describes a new Haskell library, named Repa, for multi-dimensional, regular arrays based on our work on Data Parallel Haskell and a delayed array representation avoiding unnecessary data structures. As the following table shows, the sequential performance already gets close to the performance of C programs. More importantly, the Haskell code transparently makes use of multicore hardware — something that is much more difficult in C.

The Haskell code is purely functional, using collective array operations. Here is matrix-matrix multiplication:

mmMult :: (Num e, Elt e)

=> Array DIM2 e -> Array DIM2 e -> Array DIM2 e

mmMult arr brr = sum (zipWith (*) arrRepl brrRepl)

where

trr = force (transpose2D brr)

arrRepl = replicate (Z :.All :.colsB :.All) arr

brrRepl = replicate (Z :.All :.All :.rowsA) trr

(Z:. colsA:. rowsA) = extent arr

(Z:. colsB:. rowsB) = extent brr

In addition to good performance, the library facilitates reuse through the use of shape polymorphism.

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