Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
> Tim Rowledge wrote on Tue, 18 Jan 2005 16:21:46 -0800
> 
>>You're all thinking much to small - or maybe too big, depending. I
>>think for _massive_ parallelism we want to be able to schedule each
>>method invocation to any available compute resource. Prims would
>>potentially be parallelisable as well in some cases.
>>Forget all this crap about "one cpu for garbage collection and another
>>for running the interpreter" - I'm talking 100, a 1000 a million cpus.
> 
> 
> Like this?
> 
> http://www.merlintec.com:8080/hardware/19
> 
> 
>>The current sort of VM would be utterly pointless in such a world.
> 
> 
> Yes, though a step in that direction with just a small number of CPUs is
> also interesting. That is why I call my current hardware "Plurion". We
> have to walk before we run, right?
> 
> 
>>Quite possibly the current sort of Smalltalk would be useless.
> 
> 
> No, but it would be nice to program in a more APL-like (Fscript-like?)
> style instead of the Fortran/C  one that people are used to.
> 
> Michael Latta mentioned my tinySelf 1 work
> (http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/tiny.html#rel1) where the idea was to see
> how well a large amount of code written in a very sequential style could
> be parallelized.

Hello,

I find the idea of the computation based on asynchronous messages also 
appealing. I would like to ask if objects in your system (TinySelf) were 
able to change their state or they were immutable.

 > Sadly this was interrupted by another project before it
> was debugged enough to run anything more than trivial expressions. It
> was probably some simple bug - contexts would sometimes come back to
> life after having been returned from. If I had used a more OO
> programming style (less explicit queue manipulations) it would have
> taken me about two hours for fix this. As it was, it probably would have
> taken me two days.
> 
> While the trivial expressions did have a parallelism of four or five, I
> believe that real applications would have reached several dozens or
> more. The idea of treating each object as a complete computer that talks
> to others over some network can get us very far.
> 
> -- Jecel


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