From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.3 (2006-06-01) on yquem.inria.fr X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=5.0 tests=none autolearn=disabled version=3.1.3 X-Original-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Delivered-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Received: from mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr (mail4-relais-sop.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.105]) by yquem.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7B921BBAF for ; Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:53:32 +0200 (CEST) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AjEFALEQd0jRVcisYWdsb2JhbACRZTkaBBwFlkmGIA X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.30,345,1212357600"; d="scan'208";a="27241946" Received: from wf-out-1314.google.com ([209.85.200.172]) by mail4-smtp-sop.national.inria.fr with ESMTP; 11 Jul 2008 16:53:31 +0200 Received: by wf-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id 24so3925019wfg.15 for ; Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:53:30 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=domainkey-signature:received:received:from:reply-to:to:subject:date :user-agent:cc:references:in-reply-to:content-type :content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:message-id; bh=oaU9D6TmR7Yt96wLQrkXwom3o/YsB8xs93rH4MTdxK8=; b=HuuQxfOBlc1QI+Oob1ceb2XvRkmqwdLWWZrAFhtbD2J1mj9RXQGjq/NxWPnPh2cslI w4EyNgqMRYb/PDAGU1f3LYTJ5cnYGytg5Vpweq7F1v6J//tbOAM+LABnnDFaOnJ2+OsZ yJGaDEeIpqqjp/KksagNpVR3afU8DfAMHEHK4= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=from:reply-to:to:subject:date:user-agent:cc:references:in-reply-to :content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition :message-id; b=mF+HFRX6Bo4Z11ePtH1UVoT6RM8VmBmXAaBkyp9mcteoIYBFM4om53qvjqEZu2L0As 32iq7ebVGofab7tErsHeQ7Vzfb8dqg+Mhwc4gM+a0qK1OvTQxlsse+PdtA1teBy6tx+a pkv9EChQeiHes5vi2kwHbNaQG5WX0x51QcTsQ= Received: by 10.142.230.11 with SMTP id c11mr3143074wfh.334.1215788009861; Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:53:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: from lawn-143-215-204-204.lawn.gatech.edu ( [143.215.204.204]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id 8sm873966ywg.6.2008.07.11.07.53.28 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-MD5); Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:53:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Peng Zang Reply-To: peng.zang@gmail.com To: Jon Harrop Subject: Re: [Caml-list] thousands of CPU cores Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:53:24 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.7 Cc: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr References: <200807100944.29221.peng.zang@gmail.com> <200807101500.03079.jon@ffconsultancy.com> In-Reply-To: <200807101500.03079.jon@ffconsultancy.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200807111053.27070.peng.zang@gmail.com> X-Spam: no; 0.00; hash:01 ocaml:01 run-time:01 ocaml:01 parallelism:01 parallelism:01 peng:98 peng:98 cnet:98 researched:98 wrote:01 exception:01 caml-list:01 algorithm:01 caml:02 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFId3PnfIRcEFL/JewRApH6AKDBI5Wd95Gc6YIt/nvU41lIdiaw2ACfcONA YX8PCVBkcnSYkN3R8MC1yys= =rkJx -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----