[erlang-questions] Erlang on Tilera

[Olivier BOUDEVILLE]

Hi Björn-Egil,

Thanks a lot for your answer. As I understand, we could gain access to a 
compatible Erlang VM without needing to purchase any too expensive Tilera 
SDK? That looks promising!

If the decision to perform some testing and benchmarks (no sooner than the 
end of this year) is acknowledged internally, I will have to consider 
whether we should stick to the same card and processor as the ones you 
tested, or if upgrading/updating them a bit should be still safe regarding 
the Erlang support (processor: TILE64 -> TILEPro64; card: TILExpress-54 -> 
TILEncorePro-64); would you have any recommendation? I hope Tilera will be 
able to give some advice too.

Finally, would a HIPE native (cross-)compilation of modules, targeting a 
tile, make any sense/would be possible/could lead to largely increased 
performances?

Thanks in advance for any information,
Best regards,

Olivier Boudeville.
---------------------------
Olivier Boudeville

EDF R&D : 1, avenue du Général de Gaulle, 92140 Clamart, France
Département SINETICS, groupe ASICS (I2A), bureau B-226
Office : +33 1 47 65 59 58 / Mobile : +33 6 16 83 37 22 / Fax : +33 1 47 
65 27 13



egil@REDACTED 
22/06/2009 18:09

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olivier.boudeville@REDACTED
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Re: [erlang-questions] Erlang on Tilera






Hi Olivier,

The card we at Erlang/OTP worked with was the TileExpress-64 card.
We had two different methods of building Erlang for Tilera. Tilera Corp
did a native build on their cards when they did testing and we did a
cross-compilation. Both methods works good.

Cross compiling has several steps. For example, a host VM is built to
compile beam-code and then a cross-compiled VM is built for the tile-cpu 
target.

For a user compiling otp-source for a Tilera card there is a couple of
steps to go through. The most significant is setting up the environment 
correctly, this is done with,

./otp_build env_cross $ERL_TOP/xcomp/erl-xcomp-TileraMDE2.0-tilepro.conf

and then autoconf, configure, boot, release in the usual manner using 
the otp_build script.

We were very interested to work with the Tilera-cards because of its
manycore environment and this was good opportunity for us to test our
runtime-system on a manycore platform and to evaluate Erlang/OTP 
performance. Our main concerns was of course scalability and Erlang 
IPC-communication with many schedulers and we designed our tests with 
this in mind. We were for instance concerned about the obvious single 
run-queue problem with many schedulers and wanted to measure its impact. 
We also wanted to test solution and ways to combat this and other 
potential problems. We had, and still have, a very fruitful exchange 
with Tilera Corp. on improvements for the runtime-system both in general 
and specifically targeted to the Tilera cards.

We were only interested in testing a single node utilizing all cores and 
evaluating performance with increasing number of schedulers for 
different scenarios. We did not evaluate the card, we only evaluated 
Erlang runtime-system performance. For information on Tilera-card 
performance I recommend contacting Tilera Corp. directly.

Erlang performance on manycore-platforms is correlated to how good the 
application is designed and this is also true for scalability. It is 
however easier to make an application more scalable in Erlang using our 
design-pattern and our mindset with many processes.

Regards,
Björn-Egil
Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB

Olivier BOUDEVILLE wrote:
> Hello list,
> 
> After having seen Kenneth Lundin's post about the Erlang SMP VM running 
on 
> a 64 core Tilera and the README files of R13A and R13B01, we could be 
> interested in giving these architectures a try.
> 
> Would it be possible to have more information regarding the actual 
> hardware that was tested with Erlang (processor: TilePro64?, card: 
> TileExpress/TileEncore/other?), the procedure that you followed (ex: to 
> cross-compile an Erlang VM, to select the number of nodes being used, 
> etc.) and your overall feeling about this architecture?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any information,
> Best regards,
> 
> Olivier Boudeville.
> ---------------------------
> Olivier Boudeville
> 
> EDF R&D : 1, avenue du Général de Gaulle, 92140 Clamart, France
> Département SINETICS, groupe ASICS (I2A), bureau B-226
> Office : +33 1 47 65 59 58 / Mobile : +33 6 16 83 37 22 / Fax : +33 1 47 

> 65 27 13