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

[Philippe Wang <philippe.wang.lists@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Rakotomandimby Mihamina
<mihamina@gulfsat.mg> wrote:
> 09/24/2009 03:39 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli:
>>
>> So, the real question is: is OC4MC going to be ported to mainline OCaml
>> and support in the future or not?
>
> I dont write so much programs that would really require multiple cores.
> But I think this is such a good "feature" that should be inclided in
> the main distribution...

Thing is that having a runtime library that supports parallel threads
costs more than having a runtime library that doesn't.

Programs that take advantage of multicore architectures are not easy
to write, not easy to maintain, not easy to debug, ...
So "it's a great feature, so it should get into mainstream" is not a
good enough reason for INRIA's team. It's probably up to the community
to find a great way of taking advantage of multicore architectures.

One must be aware that
- parallel threads vs not-parellel threads : if a program is well
suited to parallel computing on multicore CPUs, then it means that
not-parallel-capable runtime library puts the performance bottleneck
at the CPU. Then, allowing parallel threads means *moving* this
bottleneck (moving, not removing) : indeed, it's much likely that the
bottleneck will then be at memory (RAM) bandwidth. See, if your memory
is 1000 MHz, having 8 cores means 125MHz/core, which becomes
ridiculous even if it were 2400MHz it would mean only 300MHz/core,
imaging a 300MHz memory bandwidth for a 3GHz core !  So it's *very*
important to keep that in mind.
- for programming langages that are from the early beginning quite
slower than INRIA OCaml, it's much easier to gain performance because
they come from far, sometimes from very very far.

Well, from a quite subjective personal point of view, of course it
would be really great to give parallel threads capability to
mainstream INRIA OCaml, because it would mean having found a (great)
acceptable solution.

-- 
Philippe Wang
   mail@philippewang.info