Postdoctoral position in Functional Programming and Many-Cores

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           POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW IN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

                      School of Computer Science
                     University of Hertfordshire, UK

Applications are invited for a 3-year postdoctoral research fellowship
in  functional programming,  to  work  with Dr  Sven-Bodo Scholz on  the
EU-funded project "Architecture Paradigms and Programming Languages for
Efficient programming of multiple CORES" (Apple-CORE).

The advent of multicore processors has raised new demand for techniques
that allow mainstream programmers to effectively utilise machines with a
rapidly growing amount of concurrency available at the hardware level.
Decades of research into parallel programming have identified several
challenges that need to be overcome to achieve this goal.  Although the
functional paradigm substantially facilitates the identification of
concurrently executable tasks, its resource scheduling has proven to be
a major challenge. Only in restricted settings, such as the data parallel
setting of the functional language SaC (<http://www.sac-home.org/>), has it
been shown that satisfactory auto-parallelisation can be achieved by means
of sophisticated program analysis.

This project is based on a novel micro-threaded hardware
architecture developed at the University of Amsterdam
(<http://www.science.uva.nl/research/csa/microgrids.html>).  Its unique
features are support for resource scheduling and fine-grain synchronisation
facilities in hardware. These features make it an ideal target architecture
for functional programs. The aim of the project is to explore how this