Booting 5000 Erlangs on Ampere One 192-core

https://underjord.io/booting-5000-erlangs-on-ampere-one.html

by ingve • 12 months ago

225 49 12 months ago

elteto• 12 months ago

  “ Underjord is an artisanal consultancy …”

If they don’t weave Erlang threads by hand I’m going to be mildly disappointed.

bevr1337• 12 months ago

All process messages written in beautiful calligraphy.

hinkley2• 12 months ago

All constants are haiku.

temp0826• 12 months ago

Single origin, farm-to-bytecode processes with our signature rustic garbage collection and heirloom fault tolerance...

antonvs• 12 months ago

heirloom fault tolerance...

In other words, nepobaby fault tolerance

lawik6• 11 months ago

The advice in every consultation is either mouth-spoken or finger-written by a 100% organic (but not currently certified) entity.

lifeisstillgood• 12 months ago

So this is something like a 5000 USD machine (https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/ampereone-cores-are-n...) And is designed as a cloud provider or telco edge machine (hence the erlang consultancy)

But if you are looking at a hosted erlang VM for a capex of one dollar then these folks are onto something

Cores really are the only way to escape the broken moores law - and this does look like a real step in the important direction. Less LLMs more tiny cores

sargun• 12 months ago

I really like the manycores approach, but we haven’t seen it come to fruition — at least not on general purpose machines. I think a machine that exposes each subset of cores as a NUMA node and doesn’t try to flatten memory across the entire set of cores might be a much more workable approach. Otherwise the interconnect becomes the scaling limit quickly (all cores being able to access all memory at speed).

Erlang, at least the programming model, lends itself well to this, where each process has a local heap. If that can stay resident to a subsection of the CPU, that might lend itself better to a reasonably priced many core architecture.

zozbot234• 12 months ago

Erlang, at least the programming model, lends itself well to this, where each process has a local heap.

That loosely describes plenty of multithreaded workloads, perhaps even most of them. A thread that doesn't keep its memory writes "local" to itself as much as possible will run into heavy contention with other threads and performance will suffer a lot. It's usual to try and write multithreaded workloads in a way that tries to minimize the chance of contention, even though this may not involve a literal "one local heap per core".

felixgallo2• 12 months ago

Paraphrasing the late great Joe Armstrong, the great thing about Erlang as opposed to just about any other language is that every year the same program gets twice as fast as last year.

Manycores hasn't succeeded because frankly the programming model of essentially every other language is stuck in 1950. I, the program, am the entire and sole thing running on this computer, and must manually manage resources to match its capabilities. Hence async/await, mutable memory, race checkers, function coloring, all that nonsense. If half the effort spent straining to get the ghost PDP-11 ruling all the programming languages had been spent on cleaning up the (several) warts in the actor model and its few implementations, we'd all be driving Waymos on Jupiter by now.

toast0• 12 months ago

think a machine that exposes each subset of cores as a NUMA node and doesn’t try to flatten memory across the entire set of cores might be a much more workable approach. Otherwise the interconnect becomes the scaling limit quickly (all cores being able to access all memory at speed).

Epyc has a mode where it does 4 numa nodes per socket, IIRC. It seems like that should be good if your software is NUMA aware or NUMA friendly.

But most of the desktop class hardware has all the cores sharing a single memory controller anyway, so if you had separate NUMA nodes, it wouldn't reflect reality.

Reducing cross core communication (NUMA or not) is the key to getting high performance parallelism. Erlang helps because any cross process communication is explicit, so there's no hidden communication as can sometimes happen in languages with shared memory between threads. (Yes, ets is shared, but it's also explicit communication in my book)

leoc• 12 months ago

Who knows what will really happen, but there have been rumours of significant core-count bumps in Ryzen 6, which would edge the mainstream significantly closer to manycore.

to11mtm• 12 months ago

Erlang, at least the programming model, lends itself well to this, where each process has a local heap. If that can stay resident to a subsection of the CPU, that might lend itself better to a reasonably priced many core architecture.

I tend to agree.

Where it gets -really- interesting to think about, are concepts like 'core parking' actors of a given type on specific cores; e.x. 'somebusinessprocess' actor code all happens on a specific fixed set of cores and 'account' actors run on a different fixed set of cores, versus having all the cores going back and forth between both.

Could theoretically get a benefit due to instruction cache being very consistent per core, giving benefits due to the mechanical sympathy (I think Disruptors also take advantage of this).

On the other hand, it may not be as big a benefit, in the sense that cross process writes are cross core writes and those tend to lead to their own issues...

fun to think about.

hinkley2• 12 months ago

Azul did something like this back in the ‘10s for Java. But it’s one of those products for when you’ve put all you eggs in one basket and you need the biggest basket money can buy. Sort of like early battery backed storage. T was only fit for WAL writing on mission critical databases because one cost more than a car.

alberth2• 12 months ago

While not this exact server, from Hetzner, you can get an 80-core Ampere for just ~$200 per month.

(And that also includes hosting, egress, power, etc).

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/rx170/

znpy• 12 months ago

Product currently not available

in practice you can't though

bravesoul23• 12 months ago

Is that cheaper? 7200 over 3 years. Obviously more convenient though and less capex.

ethan_smith• 12 months ago

The article is about 5000 Erlang nodes (BEAM VMs), not processes - a single BEAM instance can efficiently handle millions of lightweight processes, making this even more impressive from a density perspective.

lawik6• 11 months ago

I really should see how many 1 million process BEAM VMs can fit...

slashdave• 12 months ago

You mean, with something like "multiprocessing"?

lawik6• 11 months ago

I found out that Ampere is into edge and telco usage way after we got connected to do this work actually. I've been an Elixir dev and through that connected to Erlang for 7-ish years.

But I will certainly try to leverage my telco-connection to get to play with more of their kit if I can.

Animats2• 12 months ago

"5000 Erlangs" - oh, they meant 5000 instances of some Erlang interpreter. Not Erlang as a unit of measure.[1] One voice call for one hour is one Erlang.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit)

bravesoul23• 12 months ago

Thanks for the rabbit hole!

robocat• 12 months ago

What does 5000 Animats measure?

Does 1 Animat convert to metric nitpicks?

You know you're successful once you're added to: https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

jacquesm• 12 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm

QuantumNomad_• 12 months ago

Neat! I always thought the name of the Erlang programming language just meant “Ericsson Language”, since this programming language was invented for Ericsson. Never knew there was anything more than that to the name!

cmrdporcupine• 12 months ago

I believe it's both.

RF_Savage• 12 months ago

And it was a pun by Ericsson engineers, as they used Erlang to program telephone switches where the capacity planing included Erlangs.

lawik6• 11 months ago

According to Robert Virding at an unnamed bar in Berlin ~3 years ago they just wanted to be like Pascal in terms of picking a mathematician. But Ericsson Language certainly helped sell it internally, I'm sure.

lawik6• 11 months ago

I was aware an Erlang being a unit though I'd forgotten what it measured. I Need to have my fun when giving titles to these things. Hope it fell within bearable tolerances.

kirito1337• 12 months ago

Wow man.

ThinkBeat2• 12 months ago

I would be much more interesting in seeing 5000 under heavy load.

Just being able to star that many instances is not that exciting until we know what they can do.

bglusman2• 12 months ago

Erlang handles heavy load VERY well, between work stealing schedulers and soft realtime via reduction counting (any program can be interrupted and stopped after any instruction and resumed transparently)

ThinkBeat2• 11 months ago

That is good. Then actual propper benchmarks will be remarkable.

However BEAM is not the only factor in this process. the entire hardware platform as well.

This is after all a lot about that nice and huge cpu.

I mean when you have all 5000 started why not let the do some work? Stress test it with a few real life scenarios for 48h and let us see some number.

Booting 5000 Erlangs on Ampere One 192-core

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