On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Casey Ransberger <[email protected]> wrote: > On Jun 5, 2011, at 4:25 PM, Dale Schumacher <[email protected]> wrote: >> If someone has, I would sure like to hear about it! There was the >> Apiary machine, but I don't think that was ever physically built, only >> simulated. > > Googling... >
"Tradeoffs in Designing a Parallel Architecture for the Apiary" is a good place to start (http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41221?show=full). It seems that many of the related papers are not freely available. > Maybe to deal with concurrency I should really start thinking of them as > "actor animators". > > I'm sure there's a way to pull this off. Even if it's by having a lot of > FPGAs on the logic board so that I can compensate for reconfiguration latency > by switching between them, but I don't think that idea fits any goal around a > parsimonious architecture, which is one thing that I'm after. The > synchronization problems I'd expect also seem awful, unless someone out there > has thought a bunch about doing a low-level TeaTime (or what have you.) Actually, I think the parsimony principle is pretty well supported by low-level actors. I've built several actor run-time environments in software. The low-level machinery is quite small and simple. Its primary responsibilities are memory management and message dispatch. CREATE is memory allocation, BECOME is "assignment" and SEND is message construction (allocation) and queuing for dispatch. The rest of Humus was implemented on this simple core (http://www.dalnefre.com/wp/2010/08/evaluating-expressions-part-1-core-lambda-calculus/). The meta-circular description provides a semantic guide for direct machine-level implementation of the language components. Parsers and translators can also be built from low-level actors (http://www.dalnefre.com/wp/2011/02/parsing-expression-grammars-part-1/), allowing expression of actor scripts in textual form. Even the Humus simulator (http://www.dalnefre.com/humus/sim/humus.html) is built on a very small actor run-time core (http://www.dalnefre.com/humus/sim/actor.js) _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
