[Vm-dev] RoarVM: The Manycore SqueakVM

[ungar at mac.com]

The "trick" seems to me to have been lots of blood sweat and tears.
Debugging this thing has been some of the toughest work I've tackled at times, and I bet Stefan would agree.
A separate interpreter per core, a common address space for the objects, separate memory areas for each core, each object freely references any other object,
an object table to make it each to move objects from core to core, straightforward extension of ProcessorScheduler, and a too-simple-at-the-moment garbage collector.

Lots of interesting bits in the safepoint and messaging systems.

- David




On Nov 3, 2010, at 9:57 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:

> On 11/3/2010 6:13 AM, Stefan Marr wrote:
>> We are happy to announce, now officially, RoarVM: the first single-image
>> manycore virtual machine for Smalltalk.
> 
> Congrats! That's a great step forward.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Can you give us a high-level overview about what "the trick" is? I.e., which approach did you take to make this possible?
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Sounds great. Thanks for sharing.
> 
> Cheers,
>  - Andreas