[pypy-dev] Talk in the Supercomputing Day, Madrid

Guillem Borrell i Nogueras guillem at torroja.dmt.upm.es
Wed Jan 14 11:46:06 CET 2009


Hi!

I'll try to sort things out a bit.

I think that there are two separate but related topics.

* What can dynamic languages can offer to massive parallel computing in. Ease of 
use gain vs. performance loss. How to handle the multicore problem. How pypy and 
python could help. Total vaporware (sic.) but the trends and ideas are important 
too. 

* Interpreted languages in workstations. Interpreters and VM are becoming 
smarter (JIT or why using loops is not a crime anymore). Ease of use gain vs. 
performance loss (again). What can happen in the future and the pypy point of 
view.

(The audience will not have any knowledge about VM implementation.  They just 
know that from Matlab v6.5 simple loops are faster by some kind of unexplainable 
reason. They also believe that fortran and MPI is the only path to parallel 
computing.)

I asked you to give such a talk because, as pypy is a general VM implementation 
you have a wider vision of such things. I know that one could organize hundreds 
of congresses on this but the point here is to lighten the audience's interest. 
I know that *today* pypy lacks lots of technologies to be the definitive answer 
but I never asked for a solution to any problem.

I am more interested in what you would do than in what you have done (that is 
already impressive). The goal of the supercomputing day is to talk about 
interesting technologies, no matter if they are not ready yet.

Numpy support and bindings to numerical libraries is a problem I'd like to 
tackle myself in the future but I'm afraid I don't quite understand how to 
extend pypy.  Maybe it's just a matter of time or that I'm dumb. However I'm 
sure you could help me to understand lots of things if you come to Madrid in 
April.

cheers

PS: I'm not trying to tell you what to say in the talk. I'm just trying to 
explain what could be more interesting to the audience. You are free to 
completely ignore anything I suggest.

-- 
guillem

Guillem Borrell i Nogueras
Laboratorio de Mecánica de Fluidos Computacional
Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Aeronáuticos
guillem at torroja.dmt.upm.es
Web: http://torroja.dmt.upm.es/guillem/blog



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