Re: [Caml-list] thousands of CPU cores

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

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On Thursday 10 July 2008 10:00:02 am Jon Harrop wrote:
> Today's biggest shared-memory supercomputers already have thousands of
> cores.
>
> > 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.
>
> The OCaml development team put huge effort into their concurrent run-time.

No, don't get me wrong, I'm all about concurrency and I'm glad the OCaml dev 
team put a lot of effort into it.  I'm talking about specific optimizations 
for shared-memory architectures.

> > It is a stop-gap solution...
>
> That is not true. Many-core machines will always be decomposed into
> shared-memory clusters of as many cores as possible because shared memory
> parallelism will always be orders of magnitude more efficient than
> distributed parallelism.

Hmm... that's a good point.  Although, I want to point out that parallel 
algorithm design (and hardware design) isn't nearly as well studied.

Peng
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