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           DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
             COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY

                     BARNEY'S
           MONDAY AFTERNOON CLUB SEMINAR


	     Speaker:	Jeff Hammes
			Computer Science Department
			Colorado State University

		Date:	Monday, February 17, 1997
	        Time:	3:30 - 4:30 p.m.
	       Place:	100 USC

	    Refreshments:  following the talk

		Host:	Wim Bohm
	 		bohm@cs.colostate.edu


     COMPARING ID AND HASKELL IN A MONTE CARLO
               PHOTON TRANSPORT CODE

Monte Carlo particle transport is a simulation technique 
with origins in the Manhattan project of World War II.  
It continues to be important in such areas as the design 
of nuclear reactors and medical equipment.  This talk 
describes photon transport codes, written in the func-
tional languages Id and Haskell, that are based on a 
large Fortran program called MCNP at Los Alamos National 
Laboratory.  These functional codes here are used to 
assess language and performance issues when using 
functional languages in real-world applications.

While the transport problem expresses itself nicely in 
a functional style, current implementations of the 
languages are not adequate to allow large problems to 
be run due to memory management problems.  This talk 
describes the particle transport problem, presents 
characteristics of these two languages that are rele-
vant to coding such a simulation, and demonstrates how 
the function calling semantics (eager, lenient, or 
lazy) have important effects on resource consumption.