From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2007-01-24T14:11:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for massively multi-core chips?

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Ron M wrote:
>> Bil Kleb wrote:
>>  
>>> How to best evolve Ruby to accommodate 80-core
>>> CPU programming?
>>>     
>>
>> A version of NArray that parallelizes it's
>> work (a task that could be made easier using
>> OpenMP or similar) would work especially well
>> if your CPU-intensive part of your application
>> is math intensive.
>>
>> For more mundane tasks (web serving) an
>> obvious answer would be to simply fork
>> off 80 ruby processes which would efficiently
>> use the 80 cores.
>>   
> Uh ... be careful ... processes take up space in cache and in RAM. The 
> only thing that would be sharable is the memory used for code ("text" in 
> Linux terms). I think what you want is *lightweight* processes a la 
> Erlang, which Ruby doesn't have yet. It does have *threads*, though.

Part of the heap may be sharable, but GC makes that part small:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/186561

-- 
       vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407