[TriLUG] Perl and SMP

[Andrew Perrin]

I guess I'm just used to my computer being smarter than I am....

To my mind, I imagine just about any task given to a computer can be 
broken down into smaller tasks until these tasks are at the level of a 
long series of processor instructions. I could see a sort of dispatch 
system sending each of these instructions to a different processor in 
line, then re-assembling the results as they came in. Again, I'm sure this 
is hopelessly simplistic, and the process in question is now finished, so 
it's all academic. But then again, I'm an academic....

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, Tanner Lovelace wrote:

> On 6/4/07, Andrew Perrin <clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu> wrote:
>> 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
>
> Andy,
>
> That assumes there is more than one task.  What if there
> is only one?  Or what if there are several, but there are dependencies
> among them?  How is the computer supposed to know without
> someone telling it that?
>
> If it's a standard perl program, though, chances are that there is
> only one task and it goes from beginning to end.  It may happen
> over and over but once again, how is the computer supposed to
> know that without anyone telling it.
>
> Cheers,
> Tanner
> -- 
> Tanner Lovelace
> clubjuggler at gmail dot com
> http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
> (fieldless) In fess two roundels in pale, a billet fesswise and an
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