Hi Andrew,
Damian Dimmich at is working towards this; he had a paper in CPA 2006
that explores just this issue, and has a working port of the
Transterpreter (a small, portable runtime for occam-pi) to the Cell.
http://www.transterpreter.org/papers/dimmich-jacobsen-jadud-cpa-2006.pdf
Running on top of Yellow Dog would be the easy way in; Damian is
exploring code distribution and code generation for multi-core targets
like the Cell, and (currently) has 9 separate instances of the runtime
environment on a single CPU.
See the paper for more details; also, since Damian is on this list, he
might have additional comments or be able to address more specific
questions that you or others might have.
Cheers,
Matt
Andrew Delin wrote:
Team, I thought this was interesting.
Why might we be interested in the release of Sony's PS/3 games console?
Because it contains a multi-core Cell processor - and can run Linux.
Fred and others - I am wondering if it is possible to release a KROC
that targets this platform and takes advantage of the multiple
processors inside the new Sony console. This would give a true
parallel machine to run Occam-Pi. It could be used as a modern 'TDS'
with several cores to run on.
Nine cores is very tempting - and rather cheap. I understand the YD
Linux distribution doesn't fully use all cores, but perhaps an
Occam-Pi build could? If we can piggy back on the interest in Linux,
perhaps we might get more interest in the process-oriented-design
philosophy we've discussed on this group.