%T Beauty And The Beast: Exploiting GPUs In Haskell
%A  Alex Cole,  Alistair A. McEwan,  Geoff Mainland
%E Peter H. Welch,  Frederick R. M. Barnes,  Kevin Chalmers,  Jan Bækgaard Pedersen,  Adam T. Sampson
%B Communicating Process Architectures 2012
%X In this paper we compare a Haskell system that exploits a
   GPU back end
using Obsidian against a number of other
   GPU/parallel processing
systems.  Our examples demonstrate
   two major results.  Firstly they show
that the Haskell
   system allows the applications programmer to exploit
GPUs in
   a manner that eases the development of parallel code
   by
abstracting from the hardware.  Secondly we show that the
   performance
results from generating the GPU code from
   Haskell are acceptably
comparable to expert hand written GPU
   code in most cases; and permit
very significant performance
   benefits over single and multi\-threaded
implementations
   whilst maintaining ease of development.  Where our
results
   differ from expert hand written GPU (CUDA) code we consider
   the
reasons for this and discuss possible developments that
   may mitigate
these differences.  We conclude with a
   discussion of a domain specific
example that benefits
   directly and significantly from these results.