Archive for 12th September 2013

From Haskell to hardware via cartesian closed categories

Since fall of last year, I’ve been working at Tabula, a Silicon Valley start-up developing an innovative programmable hardware architecture called “Spacetime”, somewhat similar to an FPGA, but much more flexible and efficient. I met the founder, Steve Teig, at a Bay Area Haskell Hackathon in February of 2011. He described his Spacetime architecture, which is based on the geometry of the same name, developed by Hermann Minkowski to elegantly capture Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Within the first 30 seconds or so of hearing what Steve was up to, I knew I wanted to help.

The vision Steve shared with me included not only a better alternative for hardware designers (programmed in hardware languages like Verilog and VHDL), but also a platform for massively parallel execution of software written in a purely functional language. Lately, I’ve been working mainly on this latter aspect, and specifically on the problem of how to compile Haskell. Our plan is to develop the Haskell compiler openly and encourage collaboration. If anything you see in this blog series interests you, and especially if have advice or you’d like to collaborate on the project, please let me know.

In my next series of blog posts, I’ll describe some of the technical ideas I’ve been working with for compiling Haskell for massively parallel execution. For now, I want to introduce a central idea I’m using to approach the problem.

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