Re: Software Designed Silicon - build your own Lisp Processor

On Dec 8, 7:57 pm, Patrick May <p...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Basically it's an SMP box with up to 768 processors, optimized for
Java.


I had some discussion with someone who knows about these things about
whether they had any merit, in the sense of the "being optimised for
java" meaning anything. His argument (which made sense to me) was
that it did mean something and I think they had a lot of support for
very, very large GCd heaps, which I think have quite interesting
performance characteristics. I think the idea of these things is that
they more-or-less have a single JVM on them, so the heap would
obviously just be vast - 100s of GB maybe, and my guess is that this
is something which other large systems don't generally hit, since they
tend to be either commercial systems which are either partitioned
(usually) or are running databases which do very different memory
management, or are doing numerical stuff, when (a) they're probably
not shared memory anyway, and (b) it's all huge arrays.

These things will probably come to other systems over time - the next
generation or so of large commercial systems will have stupid numbers
of cores and memory.

--tim
.