Thursday, January 24, 2008
900,000 processes in Erlang
I started up an Erlang shell with a one million process limit. (erl +P 1000000)
I then fired up the multiple consumer / multiple producer problem I whipped up for my concurrency class, and asked for 400,000 consumers and 500,000 producers. It actually worked!
I tried it with about 100,000 processes first, and that was no problem, but I was skeptical that it would start nearly a million processes. But it appeared to work fine. My machine was getting really HOT and unhappy so I stopped it and haven't had time to prove correctness on that sample yet, but at a glance it looked like it was doing the right thing.
One of the nicest things about this was it was automatically using both cores in my MacBook Pro without having to write a single line of code to ask it to do that. Maybe that's not earth-shattering these days, but it's nice anyway. :-)
Geez, I'm still mesmerized by that Rick Nash goal from last week's post!
I want to try out my program on my graphics prof's 8-core Mac Pro and see how many processes I can start on it. Muuuuhahahaha!!!
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
The term from hell was a success, one more to go!
I just received word of the last grade I was waiting for for last term's courses.
I took the 3 CS courses that are reputed to have the highest/hardest assignment/project workloads, courses our advisors advise against taking concurrently, and I ended up with 2 A's and an A+. :-)
(The three courses: Graphics, Compiler Construction, Networking)
I really think I deserved one more A+ (in graphics), I don't know why I lost a couple marks on my raytracer, I did everything that was asked for and implemented bonus features, so I'll look into that next week. Even still, I'm pretty happy, an 8.33/9.0 grade point average for the term, beating my previous high of 8.0/9.0 last year.
W00T!
This term (which starts tomorrow, sigh) I'll be taking 4 courses. Right now, those 4 are:
ENGR 240 (Technical Writing for Engineers)
C SC 464 (Concurrency)
SENG 310 (Human Computer Interaction)
SENG 401 (Social and Professional Issues)
My schedule is half blessing, half curse: the good part is I have no morning classes and no school on Friday... the bad part is I have school until 6pm Monday through Thursday.





