On Oct 1, 2007, at 10:22 AM, Rick Moynihan wrote:
So here's my question. I get the feeling that the trend to multi-
core architectures represents a disruptive technology shift that
will shake up the software industry to some extent. Does River
have something to offer here? If you expect the chips your
software will run on will have multiple cores, and maybe you
don't know how many until your program starts running, you'll
want to organize your software so it distributes processing
across those cores dynamically. Isn't JavaSpaces a good way to do
that?
I don't have any practical experience with Javaspaces, but yes I
think the Javaspace model is a good way to distribute processing
for a certain class of problems. From my perspective though it
seems that Javaspaces are best suited to producer/consumer
scenarios rather than as a messaging system where you want high
throughput and low-latency (as I would assume is the case with
Erlang/Scala Actors).
I'd be happy to hear other peoples views on this, particularly
around asynchronous Jini etc...
Just to clarify, I don't mean using Jini/JavaSpaces to do
asynchronous messaging like actors. I mean using the master/worker
pattern with JavaSpaces to distribute processing to threads on
multiple cores as well as multiple CPUs.
My comparison to actors is merely that they promote that you write
your app in a certain way such that local and remote is treated the
same, I think. The lowest common denominator there is remote. If you
treat everything as if it were local, then you run into the problems
described in A Note on Distributed Computing. But if you treat
everything as remote, your only problem is you add complexity to code
that really will in practice be local. But the app should work.
I think JavaSpaces offers an understandable way to distribute
processing across multiple cores. Actors do too, but it is a
different model and that's OK. There's a lot of buzz these days about
actors and Erlang in the context of multi-core CPUs, but no one is
talking about JavaSpaces in that same context.
Is JavaSpaces still called JavaSpaces?
Bill
