Re: [Caml-list] thousands of CPU cores

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Monday 14 July 2008 12:32:53 J C wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 4:35 AM, Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> > OCaml already has OS native threads (albeit with a global lock), already
> > supports OpenMP and can already be used to write parallel programs that
> > exploit multiple cores.
> >
> > ...
> > Incidentally, MP is good for distributed parallelism but fails to take
> > advantage of shared memory (with a concurrent GC).
>
> I think you are confusing stuff.

Yes. You stated "OpenMP" in your question but my response was about "OpenMPI". 
Sorry. I was not aware of OpenMP, which appears to post-date my use of C and 
Fortran.

> OpenMP is a shared-memory API, MPI is 
> a message-passing interface, OpenMPI is one implementation of the
> latter, OCamlMPI is another. OCaml has little to do with OpenMP
> though. Am I wrong?

I believe you are correct. Moreover, I suspect that adding support for OpenMP 
to OCaml would be difficult because the current OCaml implementation is 
thread unsafe.

Perhaps the parallel GC could enable support for things like OpenMP but I 
personally would rather see a shift to similar functionality to that of 
Microsoft's TPL because (I assume) it is better for parallel tree operations 
that are themselves more common in languages like OCaml.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e