Qwaq has realeased the Squeak HydraVM as open source under MIT license.
Hydra VM is a virtual machine capable of running multiple Croquet images side-by-side, therefore being able to effectively utilize multi-core CPUs.
Read the announcement from Andreas.
The official release is here: http://www.qwaq.com/HydraVM
How does this differ from running multiple VMs? (that would also take advantage of multiple cores)
ReplyDeleteA second image in a seconds VM always runs in a new OS process and is completely independent from the first.
ReplyDeleteYou need inter-process communication (Sockets, ...) to use them together.
If you need faster communication between the images (for instance to drive the other image for load balancing, share code) its may be good to run multithreaded within one VM process (in-process). These threads also profit from multiple cores and have less overhead in communication.
But there is some overhead for managing the multithreading in the HydraVM (see http://www.nabble.com/HydraTools-and-minimal-images-td15439158.html)