Obsidian is a domain specific language for general purpose computations on graphics processing units (GPUs) embedded Haskell. This report present examples of GPU kernels written in Obsidian as well as parts of the current implementation of Obsidian. The goal with Obsidian is to raise the level of abstraction for the programmer while not scarifying performance. The kind of decisions and tradeoff...

Obsidian artifacts recently have been recovered from 18 archaeological sites on eight islands across the Kuril Island archipelago in the North Pacific Ocean, suggesting a wide-ranging distribution of obsidian throughout the island chain over the last 2,500 years. Although there are no geologic sources of obsidian in the Kurils that are known to have been used prehistorically, sources exist in H...

The discovery of three small obsidian flakes at the Camel Site in the central Negev, Israel, constitutes the first discovery of obsidian in Early Bronze Age contexts in the Negev and Sinai. Obsidian hydration analysis and X-ray microprobe analysis confirm the association of the artifacts with the site and the period, and indicate origins in Eastern Anatolia, in significant contrast to the exclu...

Obsidian geochemical analysis has become an indispensable tool in archaeological research and has wide applications. However, in spite of the abundance of geological and archaeological obsidian, there has been virtually no such investigation in Ethiopia. Recent instrumental characterization of 31 obsidian artefacts from the Middle Stone Age site of Porc Epic and numerous obsidian geological sou...

Many researchers believe that prehistoric Rapa Nui society collapsed because of centuries of unchecked population growth within a fragile environment. Recently, the notion of societal collapse has been questioned with the suggestion that extreme societal and demographic change occurred only after European contact in AD 1722. Establishing the veracity of demographic dynamics has been hindered by...

Obsidian is a language for data-parallel programming embedded in Haskell. As the Obsidian programs are run, C code is generated. This C code can be compiled for an NVIDIA 8800 series GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), or for other high-end NVIDIA GPUs. The idea is that the style of programming used in Lava for structural hardware design [2] can be applied to data-parallel programming as well. Ther...

Hester, Thomas R. 1973 Chronological ordering of Great Basin prehistory. University of California Archaeological Research Facility, Contributions 17:17-18. Johnson, L., Jr. 1969 Obsidian hydration rate for the Klamath Basin of California and Oregon. Science 1965:1354-56. Katsui, Yoshio, and Tuko Kondo 1964 Dating of stone implements by using hydration layer of obsidian. Department of Geology an...

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) o er potential for very high performance; they are also rapidly evolving. Obsidian is an embedded language (in Haskell) for implementing high performance kernels to be run on GPUs. We would like to have our cake and eat it too; we want to raise the level of abstraction beyond CUDA code and still give the programmer control over the details relevant kernel perfor...

The two obsidian sources from the island of Melos (Greece), Agia Nychia and Demenegakion, are chemically characterized by three complementary analytical techniques. Ion beam analysis (IBA) comprising particle induced X-ray emission and particle induced gamma-ray emission, neutron activation analysis (NAA) and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) is applied to ...