Thursday, November 8, 2012

At the Erlang Factory …

RELEASE logo
It's always enjoyable going to a conference to talk about the research work that you're doing. I'm at the Erlang Factory Lite in London today, which is taking place at the Google campus in central London. The Erlang Factories are interesting because they are primarily focussed on practitioners, and have managed to build a very supportive community around putting the Erlang language to work in a variety of projects. I'm just listening to a talk by Cyan Technologies on using Erlang within an RF smart metering system deployed in India, and hearing about how Erlang is used. Finishing off now talking about how Cyan technology will support the burgeoning area of M2M (machine to machine) … and they are recruiting!

As far as the my talk went, I was talking about the Percept2 tool that's being built by Huiqing Li and me to profile Erlang systems, particularly those being deployed on multicore. This work is part of the RELEASE project, funded by the European Commission. In RELEASE we're in the process of developing Erlang to be used in a scalable way in distributed heterogenous multicore systems.

This is the first time I've talked about this, and we got a set of very good questions from the audience:

  • how scalable is what you do?
  • can you attach / detach Percept2 to/from a running system?
  • how is migration between schedulers related to the degree of parallelism within a system? …cool research question!
So, we've got good ideas for what to do next, plus a research challenge. That's the great thing about research … in the end it's a collaborative thing. Hopefully, too, we've also made some links with people who want to try our stuff out "in anger".

Now time to listen to Ian Barber from Google on linking Google APIs and Erlang …

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