

Java on 1000 cores (in one box) - jbellis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgxCb7fjauE

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bayareaguy
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>

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

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russell
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?

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holygoat
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.

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

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rbanffy
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? ;-)

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jbellis
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_...](http://www.azulsystems.com/events/javaone_2009/session/2009_J1_JVMLang.pdf)

