12 March 2007

Having Fun With Erlang

It seems that the times when programs run sequentially using one main processor are finally getting to an end… Not only more and more computations get so complex you need to use a whole network of computers to do them, not only computer clusters are increasingly popular, but also our own home computers finally have become somewhat “parallel”. As we reached the border where we can’t tune the processor frequencies so much, chip vendors seem to look for hope in multi-CPU, multi-core circuits as in Intel Core 2 Duo for example. This has multiple benefits, but also raises one big issue - the troubles with writing programs that use the multiple chips or even multiple computers efficiently. At the same time, the Web still grows, and we have more and more systems where hundreds of thousands of people interact with the software in real time (examples vary from MMORPGs to web servers).