Re: basic question on Ada tasks and running on different cores

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Stephen Leake" <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> wrote in message 
news:82d369u0nc.fsf@stephe-leake.org...
> "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:
>
>> Secondly, I'm skeptical that any language attempting fine-grained
>> parallelism can ever perform anywhere near as well as a language using
>> coarse parallelism (like Ada) and deterministic sequential semantics for 
>> the
>> rest. Any parallelism requires scheduling overhead, and that overhead is
>> going to be a lot higher for the fine-grained case, simply because there 
>> is
>> a lot more of it needed (even if it is conceptually simpler).
>
> Have you been following Parasail?
> http://parasail-programming-language.blogspot.com/
>
> Not fully implemented yet, but it sounds very interesting.

A little bit, but I don't think even Tucker can do scheduling with no cost. 
(So far as I know, there is a significant penalty to running in the Parasail 
virtual machine, and I doubt that he'll be able to get rid of it.) Languages 
like this assume that it is OK to waste some significant fraction of the CPU 
in order to make it up on volume, er parallelism. As I said, I'm skeptical, 
but that doesn't mean that people shouldn't try -- and clearly, there are 
many applications where the performance isn't that critical or even where 
the added cost might actually provide some speed-up.

                                Randy.


                                          Randy.