[erlang-questions] Erlang and/or MPI

[Ivan Uemlianin]

Dear All

I am being given access to an HPC (High Performance Computing) cluster. 
  Some technical details are here [1] but basically it seems to be lots 
of multi-core (12, 16, 64) computers glued together by something called 
Infiniband.

I have ideas of using the platform for speech recognition: processing 
lots of data files, and training up large hidden Markov models or 
dynamic Bayesian networks.  Much of the standard open-source software in 
this area is in C (e.g., Sphinx, Kaldi).  I do have long-term 
pipe-dreams/fantasies of writing similar stuff in erlang.

Induction to the HPC Wales platform includes classes on MPI and OpenMP.

So, my question is: what is the best (or, "are the good") ways to use 
erlang in such an environment?

I've looked around on the web and found a lot of heated debate, and one 
"benchmark".  One 2011 blog post [2] is informative, and there is a 
relevant-looking 2008 research project [3].

Are there special best practices for working on a cluster of multi-core 
computers, or is it a case of "write idiomatic erlang and everything 
will be fine"?

With thanks and best wishes

Ivan


[1] 
http://hpcwales.co.uk/sites/default/files/hpcwales/HPCWales_technical_specification_0512.pdf

[2] 
http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/erlangs-parallelism-is-not-parallelism.html

[3] 
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/221211398_High-performance_technical_computing_with_erlang


-- 
============================================================
Ivan A. Uemlianin PhD
Llaisdy
Speech Technology Research and Development

                     ivan@REDACTED
                      www.llaisdy.com
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                      www.linkedin.com/in/ivanuemlianin

                         festina lente
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