a concurrent evaluator

standard press release.


been thinking about Virtual Machines and FPGAs. Both of those two terms are increasing in relevance. they will also start to sync up in co-relevance.

i've made some headway on my thesis work lately. i'm working on a "parallel evaluator" for scheme right now that uses multiple evaluators each with their own strategies.

an evaluator consists of:
evaluation-strategy
listening-strategy
parent
children
partners
objective

an evaluator uses it's listening strategy to communicate with its parent, children and partners. the listening strategy assigns priorities to the different ports. The parent spawned the evaluator. The children are spawned by the evaluator. The "partners" are the other evaluators (non parent or children) that the evaluator shares a port with. the objective of an evaluator is its current process.

with this framework i'm going to start to define different ways of computing things. for example: an evaluator might get a request from his parent to do (foo x). he responds with a promise to do (foo x). he might call out to all his partners and children "can anyone do (foo x)" if someone responds and says "i will do (foo x)" when the parent tries to force the promise, he will tell his parent to talk to them for the answer. if he cannot find someone else to do (foo x) he will compute it himself when it is forced. this is the "laziest" evalutation strategy I could think of on the spot.

I need some descriptive language for managing "evaluator teams" in order to handle the complexity of using multiple parallel evaluators. I want to be able to fit notions like combinatorial functions, memory, state machines, datapaths and processing units into this evaluator framework. i made something similar for 6.891 last semester, by creating an array of nodes that acted on their ports, with surface reconfigurability (using "CONFIGURE" messages) however, the most complex functionality I could demonstrate with that was simple arithmetic pipelines.

This gets closer and closer to the "big idea."

--whoa, this blog entry comes up number one on google search for "concurrent evaluator"