Getting locks and sharing: was RE: Getting concurrency

[todd]

Vance Shipley wrote:

>On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 08:18:36AM -0500, James Hague wrote:
>}  
>}  I agree.  With AMD and Intel both pushing multiple cores on one chip,
>}  this looks like the time to resurrect the multi-CPU Erlang research. 
>}  I fully expect that *all* desktops will have multiple CPUs within the
>
>I'm convinced that the next ten years will see huge advances in 
>parallelism.  Sun's Niagra 32 way chip will ship soon.  IBM et. al.
>have their cell processor.
>
The cell processor cores are specialized, more like DSP processors. 
That's some of the
conjecture as to why Apple didn't go with the cell, so it probably won't 
work well for a general OS.

>The low hanging fruit in performance
>gains is in adding parallel execution paths.  I'm not talking dual
>CPU here but dozens or hundreds.  Today's software industry isn't
>ready for that. 
>
>Maybe what we need in the short term is a wrapper application which
>takes care of creating nodes, binding them to virtual processors and
>generally making distribution transparent.
>  
>
Would you make that integrate with typical OS processor scheduling 
mechanisms, or
would it be something completely separate?