[Vm-dev] RoarVM: The Manycore SqueakVM

[Stefan Marr]

Dear Smalltalk community:


We are happy to announce, now officially, RoarVM: the first single-image
manycore virtual machine for Smalltalk.


The RoarVM supports the parallel execution of Smalltalk programs on x86
compatible multicore systems and Tilera TILE64-based manycore systems. It is
tested with standard Squeak 4.1 closure-enabled images, and with a stripped
down version of a MVC-based Squeak 3.7 image. Support for Pharo 1.2 is
currently limited to 1 core, but we are working on it.

A small teaser:
  1 core   66286897 bytecodes/sec;  2910474 sends/sec
  8 cores 470588235 bytecodes/sec; 19825677 sends/sec


RoarVM is based on the work of David Ungar and Sam S. Adams at IBM Research.
The port to x86 multicore systems was done by me. They open-sourced their VM,
formerly know as Renaissance VM (RVM), under the Eclipse Public License [1].
Official announcement of the IBM source code release:
  http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr/rvm-open-source-release/

The source code of the RoarVM has been released as open source to enable the
Smalltalk community to evaluate the ideas and possibly integrate them into
existing systems. So, the RoarVM is meant to experiment with Smalltalk systems
on multi- and manycore machines.

The open source project, and downloads can also be found on GitHub: 
    http://github.com/smarr/RoarVM
    http://github.com/smarr/RoarVM/downloads

For more detailed information, please refer to the README file[3].
Instructions to compile the RoarVM on Linux and OS X can be found at [4].
Windows is currently not supported, however, there are good chances that it
will work with cygwin or pthreads for win32, but that has not be verified in
anyway. If you feel brave, please give it a shot and report back.

If the community does not object, we would like to occupy the
vm-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org mailinglist for related discussions. So, if
you run into any trouble while experimenting with the RoarVM, do not hesitate
to report any problems and ask any questions.

You can also follow us on Twitter @roarvm [5].

Best regards
Stefan Marr

[1] http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
[2] http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr/rvm-open-source-release/
[3] http://github.com/smarr/RoarVM/blob/master/README.rst
[4] http://github.com/smarr/RoarVM/blob/master/INSTALL.rst
[5] http://twitter.com/roarvm

-- 
Stefan Marr
Software Languages Lab
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2 / B-1050 Brussels / Belgium
http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr
Phone: +32 2 629 2974
Fax:   +32 2 629 3525