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0 pointsseanmcdirmid13y ago0 comments

Again, even if Erlang supports hardware threading properly, it doesn't magically become a good platform for parallel computing, there is no guarantee it will scale at all.

Its funny actually: a PL person thinks the key to scalable parallelism is hardware threading; a graphics or systems person thinks the key is a well planned pipeline.

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willvarfar13y ago

http://talks.golang.org/2012/waza.slide

"Once we have the breakdown, parallelization can fall out and correctness is easy."

Joe is saying this too. And he's saying that because Erlang is a concurrent language, parallelism (he's thinking MIMD not SIMD) is easy. He says:

> Now Erlang is (in case you missed it) a concurrent language, so Erlang programs should in principle go a lot faster when run on parallel computers, the only thing that stops this is if the Erlang programs have sequential bottlenecks.

I don't think he - nor the Go chaps - conflate concurrency and parallelism.

seanmcdirmidOP13y ago

My main issue here is that people here "parallelism" and "a lot faster" they automatically think "scaling." But just hardware threading doesn't get us anywhere near that goal, even if we write our C-style multi-threaded code by hand very carefully.

The PL community is still not having honest up-to-date conversations about parallelism; they are about 20 years behind other fields.

willvarfar13y ago

Ok, you have to describe what you think the honest and up-to-date conversation about parallelism is then.

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0 pointsseanmcdirmid13y ago0 comments

Again, even if Erlang supports hardware threading properly, it doesn't magically become a good platform for parallel computing, there is no guarantee it will scale at all.

Its funny actually: a PL person thinks the key to scalable parallelism is hardware threading; a graphics or systems person thinks the key is a well planned pipeline.

0 comments

willvarfar13y ago

http://talks.golang.org/2012/waza.slide

"Once we have the breakdown, parallelization can fall out and correctness is easy."

Joe is saying this too. And he's saying that because Erlang is a concurrent language, parallelism (he's thinking MIMD not SIMD) is easy. He says:

I don't think he - nor the Go chaps - conflate concurrency and parallelism.

seanmcdirmidOP13y ago

The PL community is still not having honest up-to-date conversations about parallelism; they are about 20 years behind other fields.

willvarfar13y ago

Ok, you have to describe what you think the honest and up-to-date conversation about parallelism is then.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse