[squeak-dev] Prepare for Thousands of Cores --- oh my Chip - it's full of cores!

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Sat Jul 5 13:40:59 UTC 2008


2008/7/5 Peter William Lount <peter at smalltalk.org>:
> Hi,
>
> Intel among others such as Tilera and NVidia are telling us - yes us
> smalltalkers - to prepare for tens, hundreds and thousands of cores on a
> single chip. It's up to us to bring this power to our end users - and
> ourselves too!
>
> Intel Says to Prepare For "Thousands of Cores"
> http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/07/02/1833221.shtml
> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-9981760-64.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
>
> What would be nice for a new version of squeak/croquet:
>
> HydraVM rewritten in Igor's new improved lambda+slang+exupery bypassing C
> altogether yet interfacing and generating C or Java or Javascript or Flash
> or ... as well for those deployment scenarios where that makes sense.
>

I think you misunderstand some points. Hydra is separate project and
it using VMMaker and generates C code for VM.
Eliot is doing another thing (Cog) which include JIT and then merge it
with Hydra.

But of course, it possible to rewrite everything from scratch using
native methods, which i described earlier. But this system can be
really different in many ways. No question, it would be good to make
it in a way, that it can run most of existing squeak code without
heavy rewritings.

> To take advantage of multi-core what is needed is real native
> multi-threading per virtual machine + image not simply one native thread per
> image. Both are good for various application scenarios. Remember that a real
> multi-native threaded image can always just run one native thread if you
> want it too while a single native thread virtual machine + image will not
> run multiple native threads in the same image space. Sure multiple images in
> one program memory space is nice for some scenarios. I like that too and
> desire the option to deploy that way with multiple native threads per image
> space in one program memory space.
>

Hydra is evolutionary step, which enables to use multiple cores with
substantially small expenses in development, because its based on
current Squeak VM.

> All the best,
>
> Peter
>
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.



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