What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007)

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by BeetleB on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @06:34PM (#13476851)

>only if your program is embarrassingly parallel is irrelevant, because a almost every program is embarrassingly parallel in Erlang. The language is built around concurrency to the point that parts which wouldn't be obviously parallel in another language are in Erlang. Further, slow hashes in crypto have taught us that is actually quite difficult to make something which can't be parallelized.

OK. Not an Erlang user, but I can't let this statement go.

I've studied parallel numerical algorithms. Many/most of them will involve blocking because you're waiting for results from other nodes.

If you're saying Erlang has somehow found a way to do those numerical algorithms without having to wait, then I'd love to see all those textbooks rewritten.

Amdahl's Law reigns supreme.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by aeturnum on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @07:08PM (#13477098)

I'm not devishard, but I parsed his statement slightly differently. He's not saying that Erlang makes things parallel magically. Rather, he's saying that Erlang forces tasks that /could/ be parallel to be parallel by default. Thus, Erlang will tend to maximize the sections of your program that are run in parallel compared to other languages.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by BeetleB on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @07:11PM (#13477123)

Which would make the original commenter's point valid:

>Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor

No, it won't. It will only be true for tasks that /could/ be (completely/embarrasingly) parallel (as you say). Which is kind of circular.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by brightball on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @08:49PM (#13477721)

Not really. Think about every object you'd have in Java that's being passed around your system. Now imagine each of those objects are their own processes and you're passing around references to them.

Just on that one case, you've taken huge chunks of a linear execution pattern and parallelized it. Now make that your norm and amplify it to everything. Now realize that the message passing allows this mode of operation to spread each part of this workload over not only more cores but more machines across the network.

And then realize that you can deploy updates to this codes individual parts while other parts continue running without taking down the whole system.

Then you get Erlang.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by BeetleB on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @12:56AM (#13479002)

None of what you said will prevent the need for waiting for the majority of numerical algorithms.

No one's disputing Erlang's prowess at parallelism. What the critic in this thread was saying was that you can only get Nx speedup on an N core processor for a limited set of algorithms. Most parallel algorithms will not fall in this category. Amdahl's law is a general truth - it doesn't matter what your architecture/language is. There is nothing special about Erlang that will make any parallel algorithm scale linearly with nodes.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by amorphid on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @11:41PM (#13478589)

On top of that, Erlang has a scheduler which reduces the need to rely on the operating system's concurrency model.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by devishard on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @10:13AM (#13481985)

I'm interpreting "embarrassingly parallel" to mean that it's obvious the task can be parallelized, and I'm saying that many tasks where this isn't obvious in a more serial language are obvious in Erlang.

No, I'm not claiming Erlang breaks Amdahl's Law. I'm claiming that Amdahl's Law applies less often than people think it does.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by brightball on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @08:42PM (#13477682)

The prescheduler caps the execution window for anything that would block. If one piece of the system would take a long time to finish, it doesn't interfere with the other parts of the system completing their work on schedule. That one blocking piece will finish more slowly, but ever other moving part in the system will keep responding as expected.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by BeetleB on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @01:01AM (#13479028)

>If one piece of the system would take a long time to finish, it doesn't interfere with the other parts of the system completing their work on schedule. That one blocking piece will finish more slowly, but ever other moving part in the system will keep responding as expected.

That's how it works in pretty much any language that supports message passing. I used to do MPI programming in C. Nothing you said is not true for MPI in C. Later I did some MPI in Python. True there as well. If you have MPI in any language, it is true for that language.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by brightball on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @06:22AM (#13480515)

My understanding is that those languages rely on cooperative scheduling within a thread, meaning that the running code has to relinquish control to the scheduler. Threads themselves are prescheduled at the OS layer but OS threads are much heavier and limited in how many can be running. A Java thread is 1024kb for example, compared to an Erlang process that's 0.5kb.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by BeetleB on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @10:18AM (#13482050)

>My understanding is that those languages rely on cooperative scheduling within a thread

MPI doesn't require threads.

I think people here are confusing parallel programming with multithreaded programming. One is a subset of the other.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007) by devishard on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @10:09AM (#13481952)

I'm not saying Amdahl's Law is wrong, I'm saying that it doesn't apply to as many problems as people think it does. I said "almost" for a reason.

[ Parent | on HN ]