Monday, May 12, 2008

Haskell, HPC and Crypto - Beer in the Evening

We're organising another "beer in the evening" event somewhere round about Smithfield in London to discuss Haskell, multi-core, HPC, Security and all sorts really - so if you fancy having a beer or two with a gang of gnarly, middle-aged architects, programmers and scientists (attractive huh?) then you'll be very welcome.

We will be meeting on the 22nd May - details are here

To participate, please add your name to the Doodle Poll entitled Haskell + Beer. This is so we know how many buckets of chips to order...

As All Bar One has now closed, we will be in the Bishop's Finger, Smithfield. I'm planning on getting there around 530pm. My mobile number is zero seven eight three zero three six eight zero two four - when you get there give me a call. There's a good chance we'll get some of the beers paid for too but no promises yet.

Topics for discussion/contention
  • Crypto in Haskell (Dominic is Mr Haskell Crypto btw). Opportunities for parallelism (e.g.)
  • Is Haskell and multi-core the best solution to meet the projected demand for simulation in finance or has FPGA yet to have it's day?
  • Challenges of Haskell and high performance messaging integration. 2.4 million messages per second (not transactions) are now possible using tools like LBM from 29West.
  • The K language (an APL derivative), Fortran, Objective-C, LISP and Smalltalk gained a small foothold in the eighties/nineties in quantitative analytics but C++ remained the main language of implementation due to availability of skillset (K programmers are like hen's teeth.) Java and now C# are now the de facto implementation languages but have serious issues for high frequency finance - will Haskell be able to make an impact or will it be another marginal language used by quants.
  • Is Haskell capable of high performance?
  • Haskell and distributed memory (memcached) performance aspects
  • Haskell Data Parallelism versus state of the art FPGA approaches. Check out HPCPlatform's offering btw.
  • I hear rumours that Haskell is being rolled out to the HPC team of a major investment bank in Canary Wharf - watch this space...
More topics very welcome.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The link to google calendar just seems to ask me to set up a new event.

Anonymous said...

All Bar One in Charterhouse Street has closed. How about the Bishop's Finger which is on the other side of the meat market?