On 6-Jan-06, at 9:33 PM, Bradley Lucier wrote:
Marc:
My new 8-core opteron server with 16GB of ram just went online today, and I want to plaaaaaaay! When can we have a single-image, multi-processor runtime? Please, pretty-please, pretty-please, huh????
Are we there yet?
Brad
PS: Are we there yet?
Gambit 2.0 had support for multiprocessors way back in 1991. So I suggest you try compiling that. All you have to do is rewrite the code generator (it generated M68K code). Or you could just run it with a M68K emulator (it will probably still be an order of magnitude faster than the 128 processor BBN butterfly I was using).
Sorry I couldn't resist.
More seriously, a big problem I see with a multiprocessor runtime (aside from implementing it) is that there are two radically different ways to go about it (map Scheme threads to OS threads, or extend the current lightweight threads so that the Gambit thread scheduler can take advantage of multiple processors). Several people think option 1 is the best because you get simple interoperability with C. But I think the second option is more interesting because it is more lightweight and it allows a very high number of threads (in other words I think the C thread model sucks). So I'm bound to displease a bunch of people whatever I do!
Marc