4 ms·

Java on 1000 cores (in one box)

25 points by jbellis 17y ago

bayareaguy 17y ago
If you would rather just read the slides instead of watch the video, they are here: http://www.azulsystems.com/events/vee_2009/2009_VEE.pdf http://www.azulsystems.com/events/vee_2009/2009_VEE.pdf
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Still, I advise people who are not time-constrained to watch the video. There are a lot of interesting remarks slides don't capture.
russell 17y ago
Good talk on chip design issues to support lots of cores, particularly to support Java garbage collection. Azul has paid a lot of attention to avoiing cache misses, such a zeroing objects in the cache instead of with memory writes. It's interesting how cpu design has moved away from complex instruction pipelines to multitudes of simple cores. Azul's market is enterprise Java (replacing Cobol) so massive support for threading makes sense. I dont think threads are a general cure for parallelism, such as with simulations, vision, AI, and the like. The brain for example has billions of processors and trillions of interconnects. Scheduling a few billion threads isnt going to cut it. Anyone have any thoughts on these issues?
- holygoat 17y ago
  Multiple concurrent threads of execution are fine as a concurrency substrate, so long as you minimize synchronization between threads. They can run on independent cores with no problem. Threads are crap as a programming model. Something like Clojure's parallel-friendly constructs has the potential to make an Azul box shine, whilst avoiding programmer error.
  - warfangle 17y ago
    Also, Scala's and LiftWebs similar (but different) actor models.
rbanffy 17y ago
I am no big fan of Java the language, but I can see these boxes being put to very interesting use with other languages running on JVM. Anyone feeling a sudden urge to port *Lisp code to Clojure? ;-)
- jbellis 17y ago
  Cliff also gave a presentation at javaone about alternate languages on the jvm, in particular, Azul's. AFAIK only slides are available: http://www.azulsystems.com/events/javaone_2009/session/2009_J1_JVMLang.pdf http://www.azulsystems.com/events/javaone_2009/session/2009_...

25 points by jbellis 17y ago

If you would rather just read the slides instead of watch the video, they are here: http://www.azulsystems.com/events/vee_2009/2009_VEE.pdf http://www.azulsystems.com/events/vee_2009/2009_VEE.pdf

rbanffy 17y ago
Still, I advise people who are not time-constrained to watch the video. There are a lot of interesting remarks slides don't capture.

russell 17y ago

Good talk on chip design issues to support lots of cores, particularly to support Java garbage collection. Azul has paid a lot of attention to avoiing cache misses, such a zeroing objects in the cache instead of with memory writes. It's interesting how cpu design has moved away from complex instruction pipelines to multitudes of simple cores. Azul's market is enterprise Java (replacing Cobol) so massive support for threading makes sense. I dont think threads are a general cure for parallelism, such as with simulations, vision, AI, and the like. The brain for example has billions of processors and trillions of interconnects. Scheduling a few billion threads isnt going to cut it. Anyone have any thoughts on these issues?

holygoat 17y ago
Multiple concurrent threads of execution are fine as a concurrency substrate, so long as you minimize synchronization between threads. They can run on independent cores with no problem. Threads are crap as a programming model. Something like Clojure's parallel-friendly constructs has the potential to make an Azul box shine, whilst avoiding programmer error.
- warfangle 17y ago
  Also, Scala's and LiftWebs similar (but different) actor models.

rbanffy 17y ago

I am no big fan of Java the language, but I can see these boxes being put to very interesting use with other languages running on JVM. Anyone feeling a sudden urge to port *Lisp code to Clojure? ;-)

jbellis 17y ago
Cliff also gave a presentation at javaone about alternate languages on the jvm, in particular, Azul's. AFAIK only slides are available: http://www.azulsystems.com/events/javaone_2009/session/2009_J1_JVMLang.pdf http://www.azulsystems.com/events/javaone_2009/session/2009_...