Erlang & Hyperthreading

[Ryan Rawson]

Hey all,

I'm also interested in multi-threaded Erlang.

I work in the Enterprise - not telecom.  As such, SMP capable machines
is the standard.  At minimum you would expect to see 2 CPUs on a low
powered machine.  You could expect up to 8 CPUs on commodity Intel
hardware as well.  Generally hyperthreaded CPUs show up as multiple
CPUs on Linux - but be warned, I heard of performance improvements by
turning off HT.  I have no other info than that tidbit, so your milage
may vary.  I believe the app was Oracle on Linux.

It would be awesome to get technical preview of multiCPU aware/capable
Erlang.  Or perhaps access to the CVS tip that contains it.  Waiting
until end of 2006 seems like an awfully long time.  More eyes finds
more bugs, right?

Thanks for you hard work,
-ryan

On 2/26/06, Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED> wrote:
> There's some sort of company being set up in Dunedin to do something or
> other with multicore/hyperthread-style processors.  I'm sorry to be
> vague about this, but I'm not actually involved.  However, the University
> _is_ involved, and a colleague in this Department _is_ involved, and it
> seems that through him I will have access to an UltraSPARC-T1 later this
> year.  (I hope I've got the name right:  8 UltraSPARC cores on the chip,
> 4 virtual processors per core, running Solaris 10.)
>
> I spoke briefly to my colleague about this today.  (Erlang?  Can that
> do multithreading?)  He/they *would* be interested in running Erlang
> benchmarks on that machine when the machine is ready for Erlang and
> Erlang is ready for Erlang.  My colleague is generally interested in
> parallel programming (distributed shared memory is his pet topic),
> telecommunications (he teaches our TELE papers), and is open-minded about
> non-mainstream languages (he has published papers on parallel Prolog).
>
> So please note me as
>  - pantingly keen to get my hands on even an alpha release of a
>    multicore-ready Erlang
>  - interested in suggestions about suitable benchmarks
>
>