[squeak-dev] Re: The "correct" approach to multi-core systems.

Jason Johnson jason.johnson.081 at gmail.com
Sun Mar 2 20:42:56 UTC 2008


On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 10:39 AM, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
>  >
>  > The correct mid-term approach is to do what Erlang did:  Have one
>  > image, and one OS-thread per *scheduler*.  Then when new processes run
>
> > they get a particular scheduler.
>
>  What is the advantage of doing this compared to Hydra?
>
>  Cheers,
>    - Andreas

Sorry for the delayed response.  I'm not familiar with what Hydra is
doing and I didn't mean my comment as a comparison.  I was simply
responding to the comment about what is the best mid/long term
approach.

As far as what advantage this approach provides in general: it allows
the VM to fully take advantage of multiple threads on a system without
exposing "real" threading to the language.

I said this is the best *mid-term* approach because even this wont be
tenable once we reach a certain amount of cores.  Everyone keeps
finding a way to use more cores under the old model, but it's getting
more and more complex, at some point it just wont push any further and
then we will have to switch completely away from share-memory.  At
that point having n-threads per CPU probably wont buy anything
anymore.



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