Actually JP Morgan uses Smalltalk to distribute problem solving to  
*lots* of machines to solve complex
problems.

http://www.whysmalltalk.com/articles/JPMorgan.pdf


Lastly I'll point out much of the Smalltalk code itself was written  
assuming there was only  one CPU.
If you have two real CPUs attempting to run two Smalltalk threads I  
think interesting things would happen. An easier solution as Tim points  
out is to run 2 or 5 or 1000 images and distribute/share data via  
sockets or even shared memory. I recall once hearing about a Gemstone  
solution that used shared memory, to enable the sharing of mostly  
static data 100MB+ across lots of images. That reduced the overall  
footprint on the server by lots.

This of course moves the whole parallelism issue out of the VM and base  
Smalltalk code into the application domain...

On Jan 18, 2005, at 4:21 PM, Tim Rowledge wrote:

> In message <044ru0pgeretshra4g6cniq90bgiolgeas at 4ax.com>
>           Jon Hylands <jon at huv.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 14:32:11 -0800, Michael Latta <lattam at mac.com>  
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Does the current image format associate active threads with  
>>> processors?
>>
>> Generally, that is handled by the OS. If you're running a different  
>> thread
>> on a multi-cpu machine, the OS decides which CPU to run it on...
> You're all thinking much to small - or maybe too big, depending. I
> think for _massive_ parallelism we want to be able to schedule each
> method invocation to any available compute resource. Prims would
> potentially be parallelisable as well in some cases.
> Forget all this crap about "one cpu for garbage collection and another
> for running the interpreter" - I'm talking 100, a 1000 a million cpus.
> The current sort of VM would be utterly pointless in such a world.
> Quite possibly the current sort of Smalltalk would be useless.
>
>
> tim
> --
> Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
> Useful random insult:- All booster, no payload.
>
>
--
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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