SC Conference - Activity Details

Jacqueline R. Addesa  (Virginia Tech)

Tuesday,  05:15PM - 07:00PM

Room Oregon Ballroom Lobby

While Haskell is an advanced functional programming language that is increasingly being used for commercial applications, e.g., web services, it is rarely considered for high-performance computing despite its ability to express algorithms succinctly. As such, we compare the computational and expressive power of Haskell to a more traditional imperative language, namely C, in the context of multiple sequence alignment, an NP-hard problem in computational biology. Although the C implementation mirrored Haskell’s, the C implementation did not account for problems with the run-time stack, such as stack overflow. Once addressed, the C code ballooned to over 1000 lines of code, more than 37 times longer than the Haskell implementation. Not only is the Haskell implementation more succinct, but also its execution time on large genetic sequences was 2.68 times better than C, as there is less bookkeeping overhead in the Haskell code.