Parallel Programming

[Serge Aleynikov]

Good luck.  I am sure you'll find doing distributed part of the project 
in Erlang quite enjoyable!

Serge

orbitz@REDACTED wrote:
> Interesting.  I am taking an independent study on Parallel Programming 
> shortly and I would like to use erlang to create some sort of useful 
> framework.  I think I could use erlang to split up the data and then 
> reconstruct it and handle communication, like you just described.
> 
> 
> On Aug 13, 2005, at 2:50 PM, Serge Aleynikov wrote:
> 
>> We've done exactily this approach in one of the projects where a large 
>> computational task was multiplexed between several nodes running C 
>> ports doing mathematical optimization.  Erlang was used only for 
>> splitting work load, distribution and gathering results.
>>
>> I am sure other libraries (like MPI) could have been used, but it took 
>> very little effort to do parallelization in Erlang/OTP, and C-based 
>> code was only focused on solving the actual optimization problem.  
>> This approach also helped to use different resources concurrently for 
>> solving mathematical, distributed and integrational problems, with 
>> very little overlap of responsibilities, which allowed to implement 
>> the solution impressively quickly.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Serge
>>
>> orbitz@REDACTED wrote:
>>
>>> Obviously Erlang is not made to do computationally intensive work 
>>> such as computing primes or what not.  However I was thinking that 
>>> Erlang obviously makes an excellent framework for doing that kind of 
>>> work.
>>> I was thinking one could use erlang to communicate between nodes and 
>>> then use a port to a fortran program or what not.
>>> Obviously I doubt I'm the first person to think of this, so has 
>>> anyone else attempted this or have any suggestions as it if it is a 
>>> good idea or not?
>>> Thanks