[e-lang] Multi-Core Processor Software

[Bill Frantz]

david.nospam.hopwood at blueyonder.co.uk (David Hopwood) on Saturday, February 24, 2007 wrote:

>Kevin Reid wrote:
>> If a system has p processors, each with 80 cores, and is running n E  
>> programs designed or executed for parallelism, then you have 80*p*n  
>> vats. In this situation it would be important that vats be lightweight.
>
>Making vats lightweight is not difficult (well, not unless you have to
>run on top of a JVM). There's lots of experience from several language
>implementations in how to do this: Erlang, Oz, Gambit Scheme, etc. If
>anything it is easier in E, because there are frequent turn boundaries
>at which the size of the vat's continuation is small.

In this application, where mutual suspicion is not the driving force for
separation, it is probably useful for the vats to share an address
space.  Having several vats in one JVM would be one way to reduce the
fixed costs of this Godzilla of operating environments.

Sharing an address space (or portion thereof), will allow deep-frozen,
self-less objects (if I am using the correct jargon) to be passed with a
pointer reference instead of a copy.  Passing a pointer reference might
produce large performance gains.

Cheers - Bill

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