Your ignorance is laughable. Of course haskell has mutable variables (that are actually very awesome to use, thanks to the purity of the rest of the system), several different kinds. There ones which act like a box that can be either empty of full and allow for blocking reads and writes (MVars). Or there's the whole Software Transactional Memory system, which allows you have composable, ACID compliant transactions on mutable memory. There's mutable arrays for use in the IO monad, both boxed and unboxed (array of pointers to elements or array of elements), and there's even the ST monad, which allows you to write algorithms that are more efficient with mutability, but are really pure functions, and the compiler can guarantee that the mutation will never affect any other part of the system (functions written using the ST monad look like normal pure functions to the rest of the system).

Anyway, I think it would be worth your while for you to go and learn even a smidgen of information about a topic before making such ridiculous claims. You'll look like less of a fool.

Hmm, I wonder what the job I got at a high frequency trading firm using haskell exclusively was then. I don't think we published any papers; in fact, we only had one PhD, and he got the PhD long after he joined the company. I guess we didn't really make all that money after all.

The amount of ignorance in the comments here regarding functional languages, especially Haskell, is astounding. People actually think you can't do IO in Haskell? I, and many others, believe it's by far one of the best languages to do IO in. You get to think about what actually needs to be in IO, and what doesn't, and it turns out a hell of a lot of what people using other languages think needs to use IO really doesn't. Writing highly concurrent systems in haskell that are almost trivial to prove correct in terms of interacting threads is certainly not uncommon, and it's mainly because of the pure by default nature of the language.

I guess ignorance isn't bliss, it just leads to people making comments that make them sound just as stupid as they are.

This machine is tiny compared to at least one other open supercomputer in Australia, the Vayu cluster at the National Computing Infrastructure's NAtional Facility in Canberra, which has a bit less than 12,000 cores, several petabytes of storage (tape and disk), and I believe some GPU's attached (the Xe system at the NCI NF has 16 Fermi cards).

In the scheme of things, this probably won't help the bid much at all given its small size (and the truly astronomical amount of data the SKA will produce). But that said, it can't hurt. As someone who hopes to one day work on the compute infrastructure and systems show Australia get the SKA, I do hope very strongly that we do win the bid.

I'd quite like to see you beat my Haskell entry for the computer language shootout, thread ring program: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=threadring&lang=all&box=1 it's currently almost 20 times as fast as the C entry. If you can beat it, then please, by all means, submit it to the shootout, just make sure you read the rules (there may be faster ways to do the same thing, but separate threads of execution are required) :)