Jython, GILs and object locking.

John J. Lee jjl at pobox.com
Sat Oct 11 08:12:20 EDT 2003


"Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> writes:

> Carl Banks:
> > Your big computer science words frighten me.
[...]
> There's also memory bound, where the time to access
> memory is the limiting factor.  Most programs don't have this
> problem (the main exception I know of is quantum chemical
> programs, but that's a big chemistry word ;).

Interesting, didn't know that.  Not with the 'beowulf' machines,
though (a big bunch of off-the-shelf x86 hardware wired up with fast
network cards).  In that case, the network is a major bottleneck,
apparently.  (Not sure if it's latency or bandwidth, or both.  I asked
somebody who was doing 'Car-Parinello' simulations about this, but
what came out of my mouth was some nonsense about disk access, and I
don't remember how the algorithm works or how it's parallelized, so I
never found out...)


John




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