3.3.3  Glasgow Distributed Haskell

Robert Pointon, of Heriot-Watt University, has been working on Glasgow Distributed Haskell (GdH): GdH combines the multiple processes of Concurrent Haskell with the multiple processing elements of Glasgow Parallel Haskell (GpH). In summary the language is a minimal super-set of GpH and Concurrent Haskell and so maintains full backwards compatibility.

To support distribution we have only introduced the notion of "location":

• Location awareness - with explicitly placed I/O threads making use of the individual resources of each machine.
• Location independence - once created any location dependent object such as a thread or MVar can be used without worrying about where it is.

We have used GdH to write applications which include: a distributed file server, multiplayer games, and parallel skeletons.

In terms of ongoing research, GdH is actively being used by the group here for looking at:

• The issues of lazy communication.
• Fault tolerance - recovering from failed remote computations.
• Mobile computing.

Oh, and the implementation is almost ready for public release!

3.3.3.1  Further reading: