[erlang-questions] Erlang on supercomputers

[Ramon Diaz-Uriarte]

On 4/4/07, Thomas Lindgren <thomasl_erlang@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> --- Ramon Diaz-Uriarte <rdiaz02@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>
> > I actually have a not unrelated problem
> > (distributing number crunching
> > computations on a cluster). I was under the
> > impression that this might
> > be a very reasonable way to go: have Erlang take
> > care of distribution,
> > etc, and do the number crunching in another language
> > (e.g., C). Any
> > specific catch?
>
> Not that I know of, apart from the previous message.
>
> I'm not aware of anyone using Erlang for these
> purposes, so you might be on your own when it comes
> down to implementation. Your data is probably just
> Erlang binaries, so sending them should be
> straightforward; performance could be an issue though
> (e.g., data copying between Erlang and your program?).
> (I wonder what performance would be like if work item
> data were simply read and written as files?) But
> whether this is a problem depends on the
> characteristics and requirements of your algorithms.
>

For now I am dealing with embarrassingly parallelizable problems,
where the number crunching (both the parallelizable parte and several
previous and posterior computations) is done by R and C.
Reading/writing to a file could be the simpler route, to begin with.


> If your algorithm needs barrier synchronization etc, I
> guess you probably will have to cook something up. It
> might not be too difficult to write that in Erlang.

Yes, there are eventually several barriers where synchronization is
necessary. I hadn't thought about this (I am still in the early stages
of learning Erlang).


Best,


R.

>
> Best,
> Thomas
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
Statistical Computing Team
Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme
Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO)
http://ligarto.org/rdiaz