High-performance technical computing with erlang

High-performance Technical Computing (HPTC) is a branch of HPC (High-performance Computing) that deals with scientific applications, such as physics simulations. Due to its numerical nature, it has been traditionally based on low-level or mathematically-oriented languages (C, C++, Fortran), extended with libraries that implement remote execution and inter-process communication (like MPI and PVM). But those libraries just provide what Erlang does out-of-the-box: networking, process distribution, concurrency, interprocess communication and fault tolerance. So, is it possible to use Erlang as a foundation for developing HPTC applications? This paper shows our experiences in using Erlang for distributed number-crunching systems. We introduce two extensions: a simple and efficient foreign function interface (FFI), and an Erlang binding for numerical libraries. We use them as a basis for developing a simple mathematically-oriented programming language (in the style of Matlab) compiled into Core Erlang. These tools are later used for creating a HPTC framework (based on message-passing) and an IDE for distributed applications.

@InProceedings{SCP08a,
  author       = {Scalas, A. and Casu, G. and Pili, P.},
  title        = {High-performance technical computing with erlang},
  booktitle    = {ERLANG '08: Proceedings Of The 7th ACM SIGPLAN Workshop On ERLANG},
  pages        = {49--60},
  month        = {september},
  year         = {2008},
  editor       = {ACM},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  organization = {ACM},
  address      = {New York, NY, USA},
  note         = {isbn: 978-1-60558-065-4  idxproject: RT SIM GEMS},
  keywords     = {erlang, hpc, numerical applications},
  doi          = {10.1145/1411273.1411281},
  url          = {10.1145/1411273.1411281
}