[erlang-questions] Google Summer of Code 2008

[jm]

Toby Thain wrote:
>>  * Organise a list of project ideas that we'd like students to work
>>    on.
> 
> One perennial topic is porting Erlang to embedded/tiny systems, and  
> how small the runtime can feasibly be.
> 

Should I mention PS3 and the Cell. We started looking at how the PS3 
compares with a standard intel server at work yesterday to see if the 
amount of usable processing power is price competitive. You can get 4 
across in a 19 inch rack (PS3s are 325x98x274 mm) and possible be able 
to go 2 deep depending on the cabling. So in 8 Rack Units of height you 
can get 8 PS3s. Each PS3 having a 3.2GHz Cell processor. Even if we 
don't use the SPEs this may still be feasible given that the PS3 is 
cheap and is projected to have a long design (life) cycle. The stumbling 
block is the 256MB of RAM in the device.

Full specs: http://www.ps3source.net/content/view/17/33/

At the moment I'm reading the "Programming high-performance applications 
on the Cell BE processor" on IBM's developer works which will be of 
interest anyone interested in tackling it.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/power/libraryview.jsp?search_by=programming+high-performance+applications+on+the+Cell+BE+processor&S_TACT=105AGX16&S_CMP=ART

The other show stopper is the the application being targeted may require 
some custom programming. I'm the only person capable of progromming in 
the play and I typically don't get time to do much, but that's not 
important here.

Other links,

http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/
http://dslab.lzu.edu.cn/cellpage/cell.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_3
http://www.smh.com.au/news/articles/new-supercomputer-is-a-rack-of-playstations/2008/02/26/1203788327976.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1


Jeff.