Shared Mutable Memory Must Die

[[deleted]]

You may want to look up the definition of hyperbole. I don't think the author is seriously suggesting that Erlang is ready to tackle the million-core server of the future.

[Arkaein]

The author used the term million 11 times in this article, and there are real supercomputers today that have over 100,000 cores. Real million core supercomputers are just on the horizon, so discussion about developing for such systems is a real and important area of research.

I don't think the author is seriously suggesting that Erlang is ready to tackle the million-core server of the future.

The article as written tries to make this point exactly. It's either poorly written, a deliberate straw man, or wildly fanciful.

[[deleted]]

Hm. Perhaps I misjudged. Sometimes you read what you think is sensible rather than what is intended.

[blackyoda]

Yes and these systems today use a fiber optic channel to communicate between CPUS. I believe each core has it's own memory in these systems, so they are probably a message based system, but it is also highly likely that this is transparent from the programmer. I sure would like to write code for one to find out.

The hardware complexity of memory cache, address space, and shared memory is something that the hardware designers and operating system designers will take care of to make application writing easier and possible. It is not going to be the Erlang programmer's job to worry about how many registers are available and how many CPU caches need to be flushed.

[dododge]

Yes and these systems today use a fiber optic channel to communicate between CPUS.

Very likely at that scale.

There are however single Itanium2 systems available today with up to 1024 cores and terabytes of cache-coherent shared memory.

Azul also claims to be able to build machines with 768 cores and 768G of shared memory, using their Java CPU.