[Vm-dev] Ideas on cheap multi-threading for Squeak / Pharo ? (from Tim's article)

[Clément Bera]

Hi all,

Tim's just shared this lovely article with a 10,000+ core ARM machine. With
this kind of machines, it's a bit stupid to use only 1 core when you have
10,000+. I believe we have to find a way to introduce multi-threading in
Squeak / Pharo. For co-processors like the Xeon Phi or the graphic cards, I
guess it's ok not to use them because their not general purpose processors
while the VM is general purpose, but all those 10,000 cores...

For parallel programming, we could consider doing something cheap like the
parallel C# loops (Parallel.for and co). The Smalltalk programmer would
then explicitly write "collection parallelDo: aBlock" instead of
"collection do: aBlock", and if the block is long enough to execute, the
cost of parallelisation becomes negligible compared to the performance
boost of parallelisation. The block has to perform independent tasks, and
if multiple blocks executed in parallel read/write the same memory
location, as in C#, the behavior is undefined leading to freezes / crashes.
It's the responsibility of the programmer to find out if loop iterations
are independent or not (and it's not obvious).

For concurrent programming, there's this design from E where we could have
an actor model in Smalltalk where each actor is completely independent from
each other, one native thread per actor, and all the common objects
(including what's necessary for look-up such as method dictionaries) could
be shared as long as they're read-only or immutable. Mutating a shared
object such as installing a method in a method dictionary would be detected
because such objects are read-only and we can stop all the threads sharing
such object to mutate it. The programmer has to keep uncommon the mutation
of shared objects to have good performance.

Both design have different goals using multiple cores (parallel and
concurrent programming), but in both cases we don't need to rewrite any
library to make Squeak / Pharo multi-threaded like they did in Java.

What do you think ?

Is there anybody on the mailing list having ideas on how to introduce
threads in Squeak / Pharo in a cheap way that does not require rewriting
all core/collection libraries ?

I'm not really into multi-threading myself but I believe the Cog VM will
die in 10 years from now if we don't add something to support
multi-threading, so I would like to hear suggestions.

Best,

Clement

Phd Student
Bâtiment B 40, avenue Halley 59650 *Villeneuve d'Ascq*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/attachments/20170130/fe38957f/attachment.html>