On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 5:47 AM, Dougal Stanton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 2008/10/3 Galchin, Vasili <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> Hello, >> >> One of my interests based on my education is "grand challenge science". >> Ok .. let's take the CERN Hadrian Accelerator. >> >> Where do you think Haskell can fit into the CERN Hadrian effort >> currently? >> >> Where do you think think Haskell currently is lacking and will have to >> be improved in order to participate in CERN Hadrian? > > Is that the experiment where Picts are accelerated to just short of > the speed of light in order to smash through to the Roman Empire? ;-) > > I don't know what the main computational challenges are to the LHC > researchers. The stuff in the press has mostly been about > infrastructure --- how to store the gigabytes of data per second that > they end up keeping, out of the petabytes that are produced in the > first place (or something).
Well, with the LHC efforts I don't think a technology like Haskell really has a place...at least not now. Even just a few years back, when I worked on this stuff, we were still doing lots of simulation in preparation for the actual live experiment and Haskell might have been a good choice for some of the tools. All of the detector simulation was written in C++, because C++ is the new FORTRAN to physicists, and you ain't seen nothing till you've seen a jury-rigged form of lazy evaluation built into a class hierarchy in C++. Now, would the C++ based simulation have run faster than a Haskell based one? Quite possibly. On the other hand, I remember how many delays and problems were caused by the sheer complexity of the codebase. That's where a more modern programming language might have been extremely helpful. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
