Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!orstcs!mist!srini
From: srini@mist.CS.ORST.EDU (Srinivas Raghvendra)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: parallelism in ST-80
Keywords: Little Smalltalk, Parallelism
Message-ID: <10167@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
Date: 24 Apr 89 08:02:08 GMT
References: <3736@sdsu.UUCP> <80500052@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: usenet@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU
Reply-To: srini@mist.CS.ORST.EDU (Srinivas Raghvendra)
Organization: Oregon State Univ. -- Computer Science
Lines: 50

In article <80500052@p.cs.uiuc.edu> johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
	>You should distiguish between "Smalltalk--the implementation" and
	>"Smalltalk--the language".  Smalltalk-80 has only been implemented
	>to run on a single processor (except for one experimental system
	>at Stanford, as far as I know).  

At Oregon State University, under Prof. Timothy Budd ("Little Smalltalk")
I am trying to implement a parallel version of the Little Smalltalk Interpreter
to run on a multiprocessor machine.

	> . . . .  I think that Smalltalk would be a fine language for
	>parallel programming on a shared memory machine like a Sequent or an
	>Encore.  You might want to change the primitives for efficiencies sake,
	>but that is no big deal.  Distributed memory machines are a little
	>harder to deal with efficiently, but if you don't care about efficiency
	>then they aren't a problem, either.  

Our implementation is on the Sequent Balance. I agree with Prof. Johnson's
idea that Smalltalk is a fine language for parallel programming and I agree
with him that changing the syntax or semantics of the language is really not
necessary. 

The main reason I posted this to the net  is to find out how many other people
are working on similar projects to 'parallelize' Smalltalk without making
significant changes to the syntax. It would be interesting to compare notes,
Also, I am wondering if anybody out there in net land has Smalltalk code that
uses a lot of Process-Semaphore stuff. I would like to try and run such code
on our interpreter and see what kind of a execution time difference we can
acheive by our approach to parallelism.

Disclaimer :
	These are my own opinions and I do not claim to speak for anybody else.

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Srinivas Raghvendra			Internet : srini@cs.orst.edu
Dept. of Computer Science		Uucp     : ..!hplabs!hp-pcd!orstcs!srini
Oregon State University			Uucp	 : ..!tektronix!orstcs!srini
Corvallis, OR 97331
(503) 754-4471
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________________________________________________________________________________
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Srinivas Raghvendra			Internet : srini@cs.orst.edu
Dept. of Computer Science		Uucp     : ..!hplabs!hp-pcd!orstcs!srini
Oregon State University			Uucp	 : ..!tektronix!orstcs!srini
Corvallis, OR 97331
(503) 754-4471
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