[Baypiggies] concurrency talk

[Michael Pittaro]

Shannon -jj Behrens wrote:
> Someone hinted at this idea earlier, but it might be fun to have an
> overview discussion on a bunch of different concurrency techniques.
> We could have a bunch of speakers, each speaking for 15 minutes on a
> specific topic.  For instance:
>
> * Processes
> * Threads (kernel and green)
> * Parallel programming vs. distributed computing
> * IO bound vs. CPU bound
> * Asynchronous
> * Twisted
> * Stackless
> * Actors
> * Erlang
>
> We wouldn't actually try to cover how to use each of these.  Rather,
> the goal would be to explain what it is and what are its advantages
> and limitations.  That'd be a fun talk to give assuming we can keep it
> shallow enough to cover everything but deep enough to make sense.
>
> Happy Hacking!
> -jj
>
>   
There's definitely more than one hour worth of material here....probably
several separate talks.  We could probably schedule 1 meeting per
quarter on parallelism and concurrency for the next year.  (Frankly,
theres probably enough material to justify a book on Python concurrency,
or at least a Pycon tutorial.) 
 
Alex Martelli's ACCU talk last week did a good job of looking at Python
concurrency in the general sense, from event driven and callback models
through to parallel execution.

Once you get into true parallel execution, the two main schools of
thought center around the memory model for programming  - whether it's a
shared memory model (usually SMP)  based on threads, or a distributed
memory model based on message passing.    Each of these models alone
would probably justify a single talk.  

mike

-- 
mikeyp at snaplogic.org            http://www.snaplogic.org