Re: [Caml-list] OC4MC : OCaml for Multicore architectures

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Saturday 26 September 2009 00:26:50 Benjamin Canou wrote:
> On the maintenance side, as Philippe said, we already have some half
> working version with ocaml 3.11.x, but partly because of the changes
> made to the native runtime in this release and partly because of [1],
> porting the patch is not trivial.

OC4MC seems to work very well for numerical problems that do not allocation at 
all but introducing even the slightest mutation (not even in the inner loop) 
completely destroys performance and scaling. I'm guessing the reason is that 
any allocations eventually trigger collections and those are copying the 
entire heap which, in this case, consists almost entirely of float array 
arrays.

My guess was that using big arrays would alleviate this problem by placing 
most of the data outside the OCaml heap (I'm guessing that oc4mc leaves the 
element data of a big array alone and copies only the small reference to 
it?). However, it does not seem to handle bigarrays:

../out/lib/ocaml//libbigarray.a(bigarray_stubs.o): In function 
`caml_ba_compare':
bigarray_stubs.c:(.text+0x1e5): undefined reference to 
`caml_compare_unordered'
bigarray_stubs.c:(.text+0x28d): undefined reference to 
`caml_compare_unordered'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
Error during linking

If I am correct then I would value functioning bigarrays above OCaml 3.11 
support.

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