[erlang-questions] Tilera 64-core chip - let's help them help us!

[G Bulmer]

On 6 Sep 2007, at 11:51, Hugh Perkins wrote:
>> One key point for Berkeley is "To maximize programmer productivity,
>> programming models should be independent of the number of
>> processors."
>
> What are good resources I can read to find out how Erlang programs get
> split across different processors?
I'd like to know that too, please. I've failed to find documentation  
on the underlying architecture.
AFAIK the unit of Erlang program distribution is the Erlang process,  
i.e. an Erlang process is not split to run in parallel across CPU cores.

>
> What about things like maps?  To what extent can/will Erlang map them
> across different processors?
I don't know for sure.
My understanding from "Programming Erlang", and especially page 366  
'20.2 Parallelizing Sequential Code' is map executes within a single  
Erlang process and therefore on a single CPU processor, without  
parallel execution. The pmap example of 20.2 shows an approach to  
parallelization (or parallelisation for the Brits :-)

For very interesting alternatives, 'nested data parallelism', have a  
look at:
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell or
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/CLPKM06.html or

GB