Help me use my Dual Core CPU!

[Robin Becker]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> Robin Becker <robin at reportlab.com> writes:
>> Nobody seems to have mentioned POSH http://poshmodule.sourceforge.net
>> which used almost to work. I assume it's busted for later pythons and
>> the author says it's just a demonstration.
> 
> Yeah, it's been mentioned.
> 
>> Anandtech demoed an 8 core mac pro machine and were unable to "max out
>> the cpus".
> 
> You mean with POSH??!  And I see a 4 core machine on Apple's site but
> not an 8 core.  
> 

No I think they tried to just run a lot of processes at once and they got the 8 
core by just substituting the two dual cores with two quads.

>> Python needs some kind of multi cpu magic pretty quickly or we'll
>> all end up using erlang :)
> 
> Heh, yeah ;).  
> 
>> As for subprocess I don't see it as much use unless we can at least
>> determine the number of cpu's and also set the cpu affinity easy with
>> occam maybe not in python.
> 
> I haven't looked at Occam.  I've been sort of interested in Alice

I used occam back in the eighties with ibm pcs and these 4 transputer plugin 
cards. One of my bosses was Scottish MP and heavily into macro economic 
modelling (also an inmos supporter). I seem to remember doing chaotic 
gauss-seidel with parallel equation block solving, completely pointless as the 
politicos just ignored any apparent results. Back of the envelope is good enough 
for war and peace it seems.

Is suppose Alice isn't related to the "Alice Machine" which was a tagged pool 
processor of some kind. I recall it being delivered just when prolog and the 
like were going out of fashion and it never got faster than a z80 on a hot day.

> (concurrent ML dialect), though apparently the current version is
> interpreted.  Erlang is of less somewhat interest to me because it's
> dynamically typed like Python.  Not that dynamic typing is bad, but
> I'm already familiar with Python (and previously Lisp) so I'd like to
> try out one of the type-inferenced languages in order to get a feel
> for the difference.  I'd also like to start using something with a
> serious optimizing compiler (MLton, Ocaml) but right now none of these
> support concurrency.
> 
> I guess I should check into GHC:
> 
>   http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Concurrency


-- 
Robin Becker