[erlang-questions] Intel Quad CPUs

[Ulf Wiger (TN/EAB)]

Tomasz Błachowicz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> There is a bit of buzz around the erlang and its ability to utilize 
> modern multicore CPUs. Can you confirm that erlang/OTP application 
> should scale well if I deploy it on the machine equipped with new Intel 
> Quad CPU? Should I expect nearly double performance gain in relation to 
> Intel Duo CPU? Can you help my understand how the erlang way differs 
> from other programming language/platforms approaches to this very 
> important issue of these days?

If you have an application with a significant number of
processes executing concurrently with useful work, you
will most likely be able to make good use of all the
cores.

The thing that sets Erlang apart is that it was built
around concurrency from the start, and offers share-
nothing concurrency with asynchronous message passing
as a primary building block - not just as an afterthought.

When I first came to Erlang (in 1992), I spent considerable
time convincing myself that process-oriented modeling was
every bit as powerful as OOM. At the time, I didn't fully
appreciate the power of functional programming - nor was
I familiar with Hoare's CSP:

http://www.usingcsp.com/cspbook.pdf

I was also a bit too enamored with OO in general. I'm over
that now.

There are other languages that offer powerful concurrency
constructs: Haskell (GHC and GDH), Concurrent ML, Jocaml
the E language, Termite, Mozart, ... but few can offer such
a consistent focus on concurrency, nor such a large community
dedicated to concurrency-oriented architectures.

BR,
Ulf W