[Beowulf] Re: Erlang Usage

[Dave Love]

Marian Marinov <mm at yuhu.biz> writes:

> It is really strange but in a good way :) Combining ideas of different
> programming languages.

I'm not sure what that refers to, but I think the strangest thing about
it is the Prolog-y syntax.  At least the Actor-like model should be
familiar from MPI, though Erlang stresses `massive' lightweight
concurrency which probably isn't relevant to most HPC.  It may be a
mistake to concentrate just on the language, though, rather than the
implementation and the OTP framework.

> It is fun to write in it. But still I don't
> have any real application for it, this is why I asked if anyone has
> done any real work with it.

If you must find a problem for this solution, Erlang/OTP would
presumably be a good implementation basis for distributed management and
monitoring tools if you need more tools.  For actual HPC computational
work, look for "High-performance Technical Computing with Erlang", which
I think was in the proceedings of last year's Erlang user group meeting,
but I'm not entirely convinced by that.  Note that as far as I know,
Erlang/OTP doesn't support Infiniband or MX.