Stefan-Marr.de

We are happy to announce, now officially, RoarVM: the first single-image manycore virtual machine for Smalltalk.

The RoarVM supports the parallel execution of Smalltalk programs on x86 compatible multicore systems and Tilera TILE64-based manycore systems. It is tested with standard Squeak 4.1 closure-enabled images, and with a stripped down version of a MVC-based Squeak 3.7 image. Support for Pharo 1.2 is currently limited to 1 core, but we are working on it.

A small teaser:
1 core   66286897 bytecodes/sec;  2910474 sends/sec
8 cores 470588235 bytecodes/sec; 19825677 sends/sec

RoarVM is based on the work of David Ungar and Sam S. Adams at IBM Research. The port to x86 multicore systems was done by me. They open-sourced their VM, formerly know as Renaissance VM (RVM), under the Eclipse Public License. Official announcement of the IBM source code release: http://www.stefan-marr.de/rvm-open-source-release/

The source code of the RoarVM has been released as open source to enable the Smalltalk community to evaluate the ideas and possibly integrate them into existing systems. So, the RoarVM is meant to experiment with Smalltalk systems on multi- and manycore machines.

The open source project, and downloads can also be found on GitHub:

http://github.com/smarr/RoarVM
http://github.com/smarr/RoarVM/downloads

For more detailed information, please refer to the README file.
Instructions to compile the RoarVM on Linux and OS X can be found in the INSTALL file.
Windows is currently not supported, however, there are good chances that it
will work with cygwin or pthreads for win32, but that has not be verified in
anyway. If you feel brave, please give it a shot and report back.

If the community does not object, we would like to occupy the
vm-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org mailinglist for related discussions. So, if
you run into any trouble while experimenting with the RoarVM, do not hesitate
to report any problems and ask any questions.

You can also follow us on Twitter @roarvm.

Already quite a while ago, I was involved in writing a workshop paper about an actor model for virtual machines. Actually, the main idea was to find a concurrency model for a VM which supports multi-dimensional separation of concerns. However, AOP is not that interesting for me at the moment, so I am focussing on the concurrency, especially the actor-based VM model.

After one year, I am back looking at that paper, and it still looks like a great model. Think, I will incorporate it into my manycore VM now

Abstract

In this position paper we propose to extend an existing delegation-based machine model with concurrency primitives. The original machine model which is built on the concepts of objects, messages, and delegation, provides support for languages enabling multi-dimensional separation of concerns (MDSOC). We propose to extend this model with an actor-based concurrency model, allowing for both true parallelism as well as lightweight concurrency primitives such as coroutines. In order to demonstrate its expressiveness, we informally describe how three high-level languages supporting different concurrency models can be mapped onto our extended machine model. We also provide an outlook on the extended model’s potential to support concurrency-related MDSOC features.

• Towards an Actor-based Concurrent Machine Model, Hans Schippers, Tom Van Cutsem, Stefan Marr, Michael Haupt, Robert Hirschfeld, Proceedings of the fourth workshop on the Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of Object-Oriented Languages, Programs and Systems (ICOOOLPS), New York, NY, USA, ACM (2009), p. 4–9.
• Paper: PDF
  ©ACM, 2009. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ICOOOLPS’09 July 6, 2009, Genova, Italy. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1565824.1565825
• BibTex: BibSonomy