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> Confusing the two concepts can lead to people trying to do HPC work with Erlang. You're right that Erlang is not the best choice for HPC, but you're wrong ab
by stefantalpalaru 12y ago
> Confusing the two concepts can lead to people trying to do HPC work with Erlang.
You're right that Erlang is not the best choice for HPC, but you're wrong about the motive. There's nothing inherently inefficient about the actor model. Erlang's low performance comes from unrelated technical choices (bytecode running on a VM, shitty string handling, etc.).
Look, you can implement the actor model using MPI for inter-actor communication: https://github.com/poconbhui/mpi-actor https://github.com/poconbhui/mpi-actor
And hard-core HPC people are talking about the actor model in Cray's Chapel language: http://chapel.cray.com/education/cs380p-actors.pdf http://chapel.cray.com/education/cs380p-actors.pdf
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoThe actor model itself is designed for concurrency, but it is close enough to message passing that people often confuse both, and there are lots of points in between that can be considered actorish (just not Hewitt's original model). Shared memory is also quite nice when you can afford it in non-distributed settings (never use MPI on just one machine!). If your problem can fit in GPU memory, CUDA will do wonders. Is chapel still around? I thought the Darpa money ran out.