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

[Hugh Perkins]

On 9/8/07, David King <dking@REDACTED> wrote:
> If you have that many lists, chunk it up into the number of cores
> available, and run that many processes.

Yes, exactly: you need to calculate the number of available cores for
the algorithm to be efficient, so the program is not independent of
the number of cores.

Note that I'm not proposing that other people modify Erlang to provide
automatic threading; I'm pondering to what extent Erlang already
provides automatic threading (it doesnt seem to), and how easy it
would be to add it.

Automatic threading really ought to be dynamic, so Erlang's having a
VM makes that somewhat easier.

Going back to my earlier question ;-), I get the impression that
Erlang runs in a VM?
What documentation is available on how this works?  To what extent is
information about maps and so on available from within the bytecode?
And, the ten thousand dollar question: to what extent could it be
feasible to modify the VM to automatically split maps across available
processor cores?