Is it time to start rethinking concurrency in OCaml? I have followed the argumentation of only using one native thread for the OCaml runtime. I can easily see how this can increase performance and simplify implementation. I can also see that spawning new processes makes sense, so you get a local heap for each task.
However, as we move forward it seems that we will get more than a few cores on the same computational node according to the following article: Intel says to prepare for 'thousands of cores': http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-9981760-64.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 As I see it, it is not feasible to spawn a new process with a local heap for each core, when the number of cores increases dramatically. I am not sure that a parallel GC is a sufficient solution either due to the high contention on memory, at least unless it provide some additional core affinity features. I believe some level of compiler support is needed in the not so distant future such that enough primitives are available to build powerful multi-core aware libraries. One approach could be micro heaps with core affinity and handle mutable memory specially. Regards, Mikkel _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
