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0 pointsTickleSteve7y ago0 comments

I would suggest you don't make dramatic claims for a subject that has decades of theory behind it with a huge amount of nuance depending on the exact workload and characteristics of the machines in question.

Don't get me wrong, message-passing has some advantages, but they certainly aren't that it 'solves' parallelism. If you wish to know more, investigate:

- Smalltalk and Erlang (for message passing languages).

- QNX (for a message-passing OS)

- mpiPY (for a message-passing Python library, mpi is the grandfather of message passing libraries that runs everywhere).

- Occam & the transputer for an example of a hardware-mp implementation (actually its Communicating Sequential Processes, but for your purposes it would be enlightening).

- golang for a modern-day implementation of CSP.

- Python implementation of CSP (https://github.com/futurecore/python-csp)

- Discussion about MP (http://wiki.c2.com/?MessagePassingConcurrency, for more just google it)

Basically, its great that you want to learn about concurrency & parallelism, but you've come to a gun fight with a blunt butter knife.

0 comments

bushin7y ago

HN comment section shouldn't be a gun fight.

jstarfish7y ago

It isn't, it was more a metaphor for the fact that he's making arguments way out of his league of understanding.

devxpy7y ago

> I would suggest you don't make dramatic claims

If you could point out some stuff from ZProc's page, that would be nice!

> mpi is the grandfather of message passing libraries

Never heard of it before, but just a simple google search reveals that it _might_ be more performant than zmq, but not as fault-tolerant and flexible. It really looks like a niche thing, from this comment by peter hintjens

> Why smart cloud builders are betting everything on 0MQ. In detail, compare to the alternatives. Hand-rolling your own TCP stack is insane. Using any broker-based product won't scale. Buying licenses from IBM or TIBCO would eat up your capital. Supercomputing products like MPI aren't designed for this scale. There is literally no alternative.

(http://zeromq.org/docs:the-ten-minute-talk)

> Don't get me wrong, message-passing has some advantages, but they certainly aren't that it 'solves' parallelism.

Doesn't it? (For most people)

---

I can't believe I'm hearing words against zmq on HN, its wierd.

Even the guys over at Dask settled on ZMQ over anything - https://github.com/dask/distributed/issues/776

P.S. Seems like you know quite a lot about this topic. Do you have any projects of your own that I can see?

Bottom line, I think most people would be happy doing message passing parallelism in the real world. Sure, it doesn't look that good in theory but works damn good in practicality.

TickleSteveOP7y ago

Nothing against zeromq, its good s/w, but like all tools it must be used appropriately.

...also, nanomsg is the 'improved' successor.

Also, MPI isn't a 'niche' thing, its the way that a large proportion of high-performance applications have been implemented for a few decades (think Crays & weather prediction). Zeromq has a few simple web-apps using it (I exagerate slightly).

devxpy7y ago

Seems like you know quite a lot about this topic. Do you have any projects of your own that I can see?

Or do you only work for your employer or something?

2 more replies

devxpy7y ago

Is "Crays and weather prediction" really a part of everyday compute?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsTickleSteve7y ago0 comments

Don't get me wrong, message-passing has some advantages, but they certainly aren't that it 'solves' parallelism. If you wish to know more, investigate:

- Smalltalk and Erlang (for message passing languages).

- QNX (for a message-passing OS)

- mpiPY (for a message-passing Python library, mpi is the grandfather of message passing libraries that runs everywhere).

- Occam & the transputer for an example of a hardware-mp implementation (actually its Communicating Sequential Processes, but for your purposes it would be enlightening).

- golang for a modern-day implementation of CSP.

- Python implementation of CSP (https://github.com/futurecore/python-csp)

- Discussion about MP (http://wiki.c2.com/?MessagePassingConcurrency, for more just google it)

Basically, its great that you want to learn about concurrency & parallelism, but you've come to a gun fight with a blunt butter knife.

0 comments

bushin7y ago

HN comment section shouldn't be a gun fight.

jstarfish7y ago

It isn't, it was more a metaphor for the fact that he's making arguments way out of his league of understanding.

devxpy7y ago

> I would suggest you don't make dramatic claims

If you could point out some stuff from ZProc's page, that would be nice!

> mpi is the grandfather of message passing libraries

(http://zeromq.org/docs:the-ten-minute-talk)

> Don't get me wrong, message-passing has some advantages, but they certainly aren't that it 'solves' parallelism.

Doesn't it? (For most people)

---

I can't believe I'm hearing words against zmq on HN, its wierd.

Even the guys over at Dask settled on ZMQ over anything - https://github.com/dask/distributed/issues/776

P.S. Seems like you know quite a lot about this topic. Do you have any projects of your own that I can see?

Bottom line, I think most people would be happy doing message passing parallelism in the real world. Sure, it doesn't look that good in theory but works damn good in practicality.

TickleSteveOP7y ago

Nothing against zeromq, its good s/w, but like all tools it must be used appropriately.

...also, nanomsg is the 'improved' successor.

devxpy7y ago

Seems like you know quite a lot about this topic. Do you have any projects of your own that I can see?

Or do you only work for your employer or something?

2 more replies

devxpy7y ago

Is "Crays and weather prediction" really a part of everyday compute?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse