Re: parallelism

[Laurence Clark]

Does any capacity for parallel processing exist in Swarm at
the moment?  Surely the ability to execute schedules
concurrently enables some degree of parallelism?

At 10:13 24/03/00 -0800, you wrote:
>
>Since parallelism has come up, I'd like to pass on a tidbit
>from a recent paper on multi-threaded computation.  I like
>it because it's all about providing the processors with
>autonomy and self-interested behavior (a.k.a. "agency").
>
From: Blumofe, R. D. and Leiserson, C. E.; "Scheduling
>Multithreaded Computations by Work Stealing". Journal of the
>ACM; Vol. 46, No. 5, September 1999, pp. 720–748.
>
>>Two scheduling paradigms have arisen to address the problem of scheduling
>>multithreaded computations: work sharing and work stealing. In work sharing,
>>whenever a processor generates new threads, the scheduler attempts to migrate
>>some of them to other processors in hopes of distributing the work to 
>>underuti-lized processors. In work stealing, however, underutilized 
>>processors take the initiative: they attempt to “steal” threads from other 
>>processors. Intuitively, the migration of threads occurs less frequently 
>>with work stealing than with work sharing, since when all processors have 
>>work to do, no threads are migrated by a work-stealing scheduler, but 
>>threads are always migrated by a work-sharing scheduler.
>
>This is rather cool from an ALife perspective in that the
>work becomes the malthusian resource.  They developed a randomized
>work stealing algorithm where the "randomized" part refers to the
>uniformly random selection by a thief of a victim processor from
>which work is stolen.  It's unclear from my first read of the
>article what defines the space of processors the thief processors
>choose randomly from.  But, if we could do something akin to
>what Mosix does with its "processor pool", where each processor
>randomly configures a multicast signal periodically, letting some
>subset of the total populace know of its existence, then not only
>would the pool of potential work be distributed (as in the article)
>but we'd also have a scalable mechanism for dynamic machine
>configuration.  I'm not sure we could rip out the homunculus of a
>Mosix system, though, without killing the body.
>
>I suppose the question I'm trying to raise, here, is "do we want
>to make the machine/model a close mapping?  or do we want to go
>full-on for logical abstraction and build things like virtual
>machines?"
>
>glen
>
>--
>glen e. p. ropella =><= The front line is everywhere. Hail Eris!
>Home: http://forager.swarm.com/~gepr              (505) 424-0448
>Work: http://www.swarm.com                        (505) 995-0818
>
>
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