Erlang on "Cell" Architectures

[Dominique de Waleffe]

I have also been thinking that Erlang might be a very nice language to 
do the high level coordination. We would still need to invent the 
algorithms that work well on such a parallel/distributed architecture.

 > Thomas Lindgren wrote:
> I only know of Cell what I've read in the news, and
> would say Erlang seems partly suitable. 

I agree.

> 
> First, each cell CPU has a collection of asynchronous
> vector units. Programming those in Erlang seems
> unnecessary. (But hey, who knows?)

But then how would you program those? Assembly?
When more documentation is available (*) it may be possible to devise a 
?simple? DSL which can be easily transformed into instructions for those 
units.

> Coordinating the cell CPUs may be a more suitable
> task. Cell seems to rely on low-level mechanisms for
> parallelism, so one might want to build a lightweight,
> naked metal RTOS implementation of Erlang to take
> advantage of those.

Could it be possible to devise a way of sending RPC like messages 
(implemented via a some low level driver) to the cells that would 
execute the provided code, along with the provided data?

Erlang would just be run on the main CPU, most surely compile the DSL 
for small bits of code into executable representation and coordinate the 
   algorithms at the high level.

That would be a fun project to do such a thing....

D.

(*) if anyone knows about pointers to more literature on the cell, I'm 
interested...
-- 
Dominique de Waleffe
E-mail: ddw@REDACTED, domi@REDACTED
IM-ICQ: 271788942
IM-MSN:  domi@REDACTED
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