Re: [Caml-list] thousands of CPU cores

[Peng Zang <peng.zang@gmail.com>]

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On Thursday 10 July 2008 01:57:44 am J C wrote:
> I know that Caml team wanted to see if many-core shared-memory systems
> were going to stick around before bothering with Caml development that
> takes advantage of them.
>
> Well, it looks like they are here to stay, after all:
>
> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-9981760-64.html
>

This article doesn't say anything about whether the many-core system will be 
shared-memory.  Remember, a shared memory architecture has to deal with cache 
and memory coherence.  The prevailing view is that the overhead for such an 
approach does not scale.  For massively parallel computation we must turn to 
message passing or barrier/sync paradigms.

I am doubtful that a thousand core machine will be shared-memory based.

Also, this is a CNET article.. not exactly known for being in depth or well 
researched and this article is no exception.  It is an article based entirely 
on a few speculative comments of some Intel guys.  I wouldn't take it too 
seriously.

Personally, I can see why the Caml development team opted not to put effort 
into dealing with shared-memory systems.  It is a stop-gap solution.  That 
said, it is an important stop-gap solution and the gap may be a while so I 
can defintely understand why some people (eg. Jon) wish very hard for them to 
do something about it.  But as previous posts have mentioned, there's JoCaml, 
and MPI for OCaml, etc..

Peng

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