[TriLUG] Perl and SMP

[Andrew Perrin]

Well, definitely *not* being a computer science type, I could imagine a 
"smart" interpreter that would open as many threads as there were 
processors, then assign particular tasks to each process and return them 
to the main, thereby making the threading transparent to the user/process. 
I assume this has been thought of and either implemented or rejected for a 
good reason, but that's what I was thinking about.

Andy

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu - http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu
Assistant Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_
University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
New Book: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/178592.ctl



On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Andrew C. Oliver wrote:

> Being a big dumb person...is there any technology that uses multiple
> processors without forking into processes or launching threads?
>
> -Andy
>
> Andrew Perrin wrote:
>> On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Michael Tharp wrote:
>>
>>> Andrew Perrin wrote:
>>>> I fear I know the answer to this already, but...
>>>>
>>>> is there any way to get perl to use the multiple processors on an SMP
>>>> machine (running linux, of course), short of fork()ing distinct processes?
>>>> I've got a text processing program chugging along on one processor with
>>>> three more sitting there idle, and it would be nice to see it Just Work
>>>> (tm) by using all four. But it's not worth rewriting the program to fork
>>>> into separate threads.
>>>>
>>> You've already exhausted your only two choices: either spawn threads
>>> (Perl threading), or spawn processes (fork). You can't make a single
>>> thread use more than one processor.
>>
>> That's what I figured, thanks.
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu - http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu
>> Assistant Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_
>> University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
>> New Book: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/178592.ctl
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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