Java on 1000 cores (in one box) | Hacker News Reader

Java on 1000 cores (in one box)

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25 pointsjbellis7 comments

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

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

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?

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.

Also, Scala's and LiftWebs similar (but different) actor models.

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? ;-)

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_...

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