massively parallel smalltalk

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Sat Apr 28 00:55:37 UTC 2001


While I really like Linda (and have seen at least two nice 
implementations in Smalltalk), it does require using a very different 
design for your programs.

Several other alternatives have been developed for massively parallel 
Smalltalk and I would recomend at least a quick look at:

   http://cva.stanford.edu/j-machine/cva_j_machine.html

Though this Concurrent Smalltalk (there was another project with the 
same name) had a Lisp-like syntax instead of the keywords we love so 
much, it really was Smalltalk and was running on 1024 node machines.

Hmmm... I see only a brief mention of "distributed objects" in there, 
though I was pretty sure that was where the notion of "concurrent 
aggregates" came from. The idea was that if collections were allocated 
with its members spread out through several nodes, messages such as 
#do:, #select: and so on would automatically express parallel 
execution. So many "normal" Smalltalk programs could become highly 
parallel simply by using concurrent versions of collection objects 
instead of having to rewrite everything to use tuples.

-- Jecel





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