Re: [Caml-list] Link tracking

Re: [Caml-list] Link tracking

[Jon Harrop]

On Wednesday 24 September 2008 14:30:34 Chris Clearwater wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 20:03 +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> > Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
> > http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e
>
> I notice that your caml-list postings tack "?e" onto the end of all
> links to your company page. You seem to use "?u" on your c.l.f postings.
> Is this used to gauge the effective of drawing eyeballs to your website?

Yes. Forgive my posting this to the list but I noticed none of my posts have 
gone through lately so I want to make sure this works... ;-)

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

thousands of CPU cores

[J C]

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

As much as I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, and I think Caml
has been a great and grossly underappreciated product, I need to see
if writing Caml is a viable code investment for the coming years or
something like Haskell, SML, F# or even Ada will be a better long-term
alternative.

Are there plans to make Caml threads OS-native threads, or add
OpenMP-style primitives, or otherwise support multiple CPU cores? And
if so, roughly in what time frame?

Re: [Caml-list] thousands of CPU cores

[Jon Harrop]

On Sunday 21 September 2008 20:05:15 Michaël Grünewald wrote:
> This is true while your are concerned with matrix over the real or
> complex numbers, but if you want to use arbitrary precision arithmetic,
> finite fields, quaternions or any ring you like, then you are stuck.
> Linear algebra is useful in every mathematical field, not just numerical
> computing.
>
> It is not ridiculous at all to code matrix routines in OCaml, since you
> can use functors to use your routines with any kind of scalar, not just
> complex numbers. And I already had to code dense matrix operations for
> these reasons.
>
> BTW, if anybody here knows presentations about matrix implementation(s),
> I would be very glad to know about it.

Exactly. OCaml's poor performance in the case of nxn matrix multiply stems 
almost entirely from the inefficiency of the gather operation which is O(n^2) 
and serial in OCaml but would be O(1) and parallel if each thread could write 
results directly into a shared data structure.

This is a fundamental problem that afflicts all parallel algorithms that 
gather a non-trivial result. In fact, matrix multiplication is not even worst 
case because gather is only O(n^2) of an O(n^3) total.

Also, note that matrix multiplication is embarassingly parallel. So OCaml's 
current problems with parallelism are not limited to slow interthread 
communication.

The good news is that the parallel GC is coming along nicely and this will be 
a solved problem before long... :-)

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

Re: [Caml-list] thousands of CPU cores

[Alan Schmitt]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 227 bytes --]

On 21 sept. 08, at 23:41, Jon Harrop wrote:

> The good news is that the parallel GC is coming along nicely and  
> this will be
> a solved problem before long... :-)

I'd love to hear more about this. Could you develop?

Alan

[-- Attachment #2: This is a digitally signed message part --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 186 bytes --]

Re: [Caml-list] thousands of CPU cores

[Jon Harrop]

On Monday 22 September 2008 08:51:03 Alan Schmitt wrote:
> On 21 sept. 08, at 23:41, Jon Harrop wrote:
> > The good news is that the parallel GC is coming along nicely and
> > this will be a solved problem before long... :-)
>
> I'd love to hear more about this. Could you develop?

Sure thing. I wrote to the guys doing this work a couple of times and they 
were very friendly. Apparently they are currently ironing out the last of the 
bugs before going public.

I don't think I am the only person struggling to contain my excitement. :-)

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

Re: [Caml-list] Link tracking

[Chris Clearwater]

On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 20:03 +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
> http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e

I notice that your caml-list postings tack "?e" onto the end of all
links to your company page. You seem to use "?u" on your c.l.f postings.
Is this used to gauge the effective of drawing eyeballs to your website?

Re: [Caml-list] Link tracking

[Jon Harrop]

On Wednesday 24 September 2008 14:30:34 Chris Clearwater wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 20:03 +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> > Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
> > http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e
>
> I notice that your caml-list postings tack "?e" onto the end of all
> links to your company page. You seem to use "?u" on your c.l.f postings.
> Is this used to gauge the effective of drawing eyeballs to your website?

Yes. Forgive my posting this to the list but I noticed none of my posts have 
gone through lately so I want to make sure this works... ;-)

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