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Date: | 2008-07-11 (15:30) |
From: | Bill <william.wood3@c...> |
Subject: | Re: [Caml-list] thousands of CPU cores |
On Fri, 2008-07-11 at 16:06 +0200, Xavier Leroy wrote: . . . > The interesting question that this community should focus on > (rather than throwing fits about concurrent GC and the like) is coming > up with good programming models for parallelism. I'm quite fond of > message passing myself, but agree that more constrained data-parallel > models have value as well. As Gerd Stolpmann mentioned, various forms > of message passing can be exploited from OCaml today, but there is > certainly room for improvement there. Perhaps this is subsumed by some of the terminology flying around this discussion, but what about (synchronous) dataflow? I had some pretty good-looking preliminary results implementing telecom algorithms in dataflow networks. One nice side-effect was that latency and throughput could be tied to the "aspect ratio" (length vs. breadth) of the dataflow network. This could be an opening for the design-space trade-off design style that hardware designers are used to but that is rare in software. The resulting designs look upside-down to software designers -- instead of a few big processes doing complicated work and communicating/coordinating with each other there is a large number of small functions each doing its thing to the next item on its input queue and passing it on. -- Bill Wood