Upcoming article in Dr. Dobbs'

[Joe Armstrong (AL/EAB)]

  Yes Erlang *is* the answer - but what's the problem?

  How are we going to make use of truly parallel CPU cores?

  When Intel makes  4 (6 8 10 ...) processors on a chip will we 
get speed ups of 4 (6 8 10...)?

  Chip makers can go two ways: 1) make more fancy CPU's or 2) blow multiple
CPUs onto the same chip. The 1) alternative is unlikely since the designs are already horrendously complex - 2) is a much better alternative.

  Also, you have to get data in and out of a chip, I/O occurs at the edges of a chip
but processing in the middle - so CPU power grows quadratically, and I/O only linearly.
Thus the best architecture, is a chip with I/O processors on the edges and multi CPUs in the middle (the cluster on a chip).

  These chips are one the way - should be here by 2006/7

  <prediction>

 - It will be a nightmare porting threads based S/W onto true
multi-CPUs - true concurrency (in the CPUs) will uncover loads of new errors that do
not occur using pseudo-concurrency - the only way to program these boxes will be
with concurrency based on pure (copying) message passing.

  Concurrency models based on sharing will totally screw up - 

  </prediction>

  Erlang is the only language I know of that is well placed to program multiCPUs
all other approaches use some form sharing and or locking (which as I have said many
times before - is the root of all evil)

  /Joe

   



> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED
> [mailto:owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED]
> Sent: den 8 januari 2005 16:31
> To: erlang-questions@REDACTED
> Subject: Re: Upcoming article in Dr. Dobbs'
> 
> 
> > "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in
> > Software
> > 
> > The biggest sea change in software development since the OO 
> revolution
> > is knocking at the door, and its name is Concurrency."
> 
> But is Erlang a solution to the problem he talks about?  Let's say 
> that in a couple of years the standard desktop box ships with CPUs  
> containing four to eight processors on one chip.  Current Erlang 
> implementations won't make use of all those processors, as the 
> emulator does the bulk of its work in one thread.  You could fire up 
> eight emulators at once and go distributed from the start, but then 
> you still need to manually do some kind of load balancing, to make 
> sure that the work is truly split up among the eight.  And goes 
> against the grain of the work toward a shared-heap architecture, too.
> 
> I'd love to see a way of having Erlang automatically make use of 
> multiple CPUs on the same box.  That would provide *huge* wins.
> 
> James
>