Concurrent and Distributed Programming in Ocaml

Concurrent and Distributed Programming in Ocaml

[Alexsandro Soares]

Hi all,

   My team is working with evolutionary computing and
we develop a distributed model of gene expression
programming (GEP) in OCaml. Our first try used the
primitives provided in modules Mutex and Condition to
do syncronization between process and threads. The
system is done. However, we will make a refactoring of
the code and, at this time,  we would like to use
higher level constructs to work with concurrent and
distributed programming. What are the options to do
this in OCaml? We started to see Jocaml, but our
system uses native code generation both in Linux and
Windows, and I don't know if Jocaml can be compiled in
native code. Any help?

   Thanks in advance for any answer.

   Cheers,
   Alex



	



	
		
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Re: Concurrent and Distributed Programming in Ocaml

[Vincenzo Ciancia]

Alexsandro Soares wrote:

> Our first try used the
> primitives provided in modules Mutex and Condition to
> do syncronization between process and threads [...] we 
> would like to use higher level constructs to work with 
> concurrent and distributed programming. What are the 
> options to do this in OCaml?

I would recommend trying the Event module which features channels and
events, which in turn are an abstraction which allows to build more complex
events from simpler ones before "synchronizing" on the resulting event.

For example, "receive a" is the event that, when you synchronize to it,
waits for a value to be sent on channel "a", and returns the value, and
"choose [receive a,receive b]" is the event that, when you synchronize to
it, waits for a value to be sent on either "a" or "b" and returns the value
- in this case a and b must have the same value type.

http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Event.html

Bye

Vincenzo

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Re: [Caml-list] Re: Concurrent and Distributed Programming in Ocaml

[David Teller]

While this module is absolutely great, it suffers from OCaml's
limitation that multi-threaded code runs only one one processor, even if
several are available.

For concurrency, I would suggest taking a look at Acute, but that's
quite low-level, when compared to JoCaml. Basically, the communication
primitives are similar to a somewhat lower-level version of the Event
module. I don't know whether there is a native code compiler, though.

Cheers,
 David

On Fri, 2005-12-16 at 13:40 +0100, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:
> Alexsandro Soares wrote:
> 
> > Our first try used the
> > primitives provided in modules Mutex and Condition to
> > do syncronization between process and threads [...] we 
> > would like to use higher level constructs to work with 
> > concurrent and distributed programming. What are the 
> > options to do this in OCaml?
> 
> I would recommend trying the Event module which features channels and
> events, which in turn are an abstraction which allows to build more complex
> events from simpler ones before "synchronizing" on the resulting event.
> 
> For example, "receive a" is the event that, when you synchronize to it,
> waits for a value to be sent on channel "a", and returns the value, and
> "choose [receive a,receive b]" is the event that, when you synchronize to
> it, waits for a value to be sent on either "a" or "b" and returns the value
> - in this case a and b must have the same value type.
> 
> http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Event.html
> 
> Bye
> 
> Vincenzo
> 
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