Sounds like something the Alioth performance game was meant for. I'd point him towards chameneos-redux; the current haskell implementation (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=ch...) is taking 3.73s to run, while the C champion (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=ch...) is taking 12.29s. The current C implementation is also small, so I would imagine that it qualifies as a "relatively simple task".