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

Jason Johnson jason.johnson.081 at gmail.com
Mon Jul 7 06:07:09 UTC 2008


On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 8:00 AM, Peter William Lount <peter at smalltalk.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I get that you think that it's a clean model for concurrency. I don't buy it
> though.
>
> Please describe it fully and in detail. Thank you.

Why does he need to describe this again?  You could look at past
threads or you could look at some of the *actual research on this
subject*.  Here is a paper from 2006:

"The problem with threads"
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.html

> You'll allow multiple non-native smalltalk green threads right?

I wouldn't.  This is a big source of bugs and confusion.  I would
personally change the ST process model to have "processes" instead of
"threads" (i.e. nothing is shared between them).

> Your "simplified" model doesn't seem to be simple at all. You'd have to
> prevent any green threads within the native thread.
>
> You then push the concurrency processing problems off on to multiple images
> and now the problems become data base like concurrency issues and
> serialization issues and object identity/version issues.
>
> You've not gained much and you've limited others needs in the process.

Here you just seem to be going off on a tangent without even knowing
what solution he had in mind.  Wonderfully productive way to argue.



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