[erlang-questions] Erlang meets physics

[Robert Virding]

We used ports. External hardware was a "process" with which you communicated through messages. The asynchronous model fitted hardware very well, at least the hardware in which we were interested. 

Robert 

----- Original Message -----

> How do you interact with the hardware?
> Do you use GPIB C libr and wrap it with a NIF?

> From: Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED>
> To: Jared Kofron <jared.nance@REDACTED>
> Cc: Erlang Questions <erlang-questions@REDACTED>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 12:34 PM
> Subject: Re: [erlang-questions] Erlang meets physics

> Great news - spread the word !

> Just for the record Erlang programmers numbers 1 and 2 (ie myself and
> Robert Virding)
> are both ex physicists.

> When I lecture I often point out the similarity between causality and
> message reception.
> You don't know that something has happened until you get a message
> telling that it has happened.

> (In physics it's a ray of light, or a photon, or something -
> forgetting entanglement for the moment)

> In computing it's the reception of a message.

> As a ex physicist I know that we can't say anything about
> simultaneous
> events occurring
> at different places in space-time - turn this into computer science
> and the same arguments
> apply to things like making sure replicated data is consistent on
> remote sites - well you can't
> - at least if you want to change it - Brewer's CAP theorem applies -
> which for a physicist makes
> perfect sense.

> Also as an ex physicist I realize that things do actually happen in
> parallel in the real world,
> so modelling them in a sequential programming language (if I wanted
> to do that)
> is big time crazy - just describe the parallel stuff in a concurrent
> language and the program
> writes itself. Wait a few years till we have million core computers
> and the parallel problems
> can be solved 1:1 on parallel computers - and programming simulations
> and so on will be
> really easy - but don't even think about doing it in a sequential
> language...

> Cheers

> /Joe

> On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 2:34 AM, Jared Kofron < jared.nance@REDACTED
> > wrote:
> > Hi All,
> > I've been using Erlang at work for a few years now, and I thought
> > I'd throw my experience out there, as
> > my application is a little different than what you usually see on
> > the list - I am a graduate student at the
> > Center for Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics at the University of
> > Washington, and use Erlang extensively
> > in my work.
> >
> > In my experience, something that Erlang is really great at but
> > doesn't receive much attention for these days
> > is managing and interacting with hardware. In any physics
> > experiment of even modest sizes, you wind up
> > having to keep track of the state of various pieces of equipment,
> > often modify that state, and constantly
> > interrogate particular values. For example, we might want to change
> > the current in a magnetic trap, turn
> > that trap off altogether, or simply read back the voltage drop
> > across our superconducting magnet.
> >
> > So far, I have deployed Erlang in this zone for two separate
> > experiments (SNO+, a large particle physics
> > experiment in Canada) and Project 8 (a small nuclear physics
> > experiment here in Seattle). Both times have
> > been great successes, and I have found the reception of Erlang in
> > this market to be great. In general, what
> > I have done is wrap a hardware management layer with some kind of
> > outside world interface. For SNO+, we
> > used Webmachine and RESTful control, and for Project 8 we actually
> > conduct all communication
> > by using CouchDB as a message passing interface.
> >
> > Physicists are suspicious creatures, but once you demonstrate the
> > feature set that you get for practically
> > free with OTP, they see the advantage pretty quickly. On top of
> > that, the development cycle for sophisticated
> > applications can be greatly reduced - more than once it made my
> > group float to the top in terms of meeting
> > goals.
> >
> > In short, as far as I am concerned, Erlang has found a new niche in
> > the world of Physics, and I intend to
> > spread the word as much as I can!
> >
> > Jared Kofron
> > _______________________________________________
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