CPU/Hardware optimized for Erlang

[Ulf Wiger]

Den 2005-07-21 21:30:00 skrev Zoltan Podlovics  
<zoltan.podlovics@REDACTED>:

> Is there any way to use hardware"plugins" for high performance
> computation-intensive applications  (encryption, xml parsing, pattern
> matching with fpga) with ECOMP? Erlang (with a small tcp/ip stack)
> would be perfect choice for these appliances (especially when it comes
> with fault-tolerant hw reconfiguration and sw update). For example:
> reliable email services or IDS with hw (virus or intrusion) pattern
> matcher.
>
> Regards,
> Zoltan

The idea with ECOMP was partly that you'd be able to
control hardware directly, through the use of ports.
Task switching in ECOMP took about 20 cpu cycles,
and one idea was to use multiple process queues, so
that you could task switch in one cpu cycle by
alternating between the queues. All message passing
was by reference, since it was essentially a shared
heap architecture.

Also, garbage collection was reference counting, and
the actual freeing of data was done in HW, in the
background, without stealing cpu cycles from the
program.

All in all, ECOMP should have been fairly good
for stream based programming -- maybe not wire-speed
in the realm of gigabits, or hard real-time as in
dsp functions, but still...

/Uffe