Run Spur run!!

On 24 Oct 2014, at 16:21, Thierry Goubier <[hidden email]> wrote:

2014-10-24 15:50 GMT+02:00 Clément Bera <[hidden email]>:

The current x2 speed boost is due only to spur, not to sista. Sista will provide additional performance, but we have still things to do before production.

The performance gain reported is due to (from most important to less important):

- the new GC has less overhead. 30% of the execution time used to be spent in the GC.
- the new object format speeds up some VM internal caches (especially inline caches for message sends due to an indirection for object classes with a class table).

- the new object format allows some C code to be converted into machine code routines, including block creation, context creation, primitive #at:put:, which is faster because switching from jitted code to C then back to jitted code generate a little overhead.
- characters are now immediate objects, which speeds up String accessing.
- the new object format has a larger hash which speeds up big hashed collections such as big sets and dictionaries.
- become is faster.

 

All this is really cool :) And if I remember well, there is 64 bitness coming as well.

Will Spur also cover ARM ?

Spur is an object format, it does not have anything to do with underlying architecture (well, at least in theory… Eliot should be able to say more on this). 

Cog, in the other side is a jitter, and it has everything to do with the architecture so is difficult to have it running on ARM (but there is work on that direction, so we hope it will be there eventually). 

It looks like there is a misunderstanding (probably not you, Thierry, but since I’ve seen it time to time, I take the chance to clarify): Spur is not a replacement for Cog, both are orthogonal (in fact, Spur runs in Stack vm too). 

Real new VM is not “Spur” vm, is "Cog+Spur" vm. 

cheers, 

Esteban

Thierry

 

2014-10-24 15:20 GMT+02:00 kilon alios <[hidden email]>:

thanks max, i completely forgotten about esug videos, looks like i found what to watch during the weekend :D

On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 4:12 PM, Max Leske <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 24.10.2014, at 15:06, kilon alios <[hidden email]> wrote:

very nice

so any more information to this, how exactly this optimization works and which kind of data will benefit from this ? 

Clément’s byte code set talk at ESUG: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9J362QHwSA&index=64&list=PLJ5nSnWzQXi_6yyRLsMMBqG8YlwfhvB0X

Clément’s Sista talk at ESUG (2 parts):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4E_FoLysJg&list=PLJ5nSnWzQXi_6yyRLsMMBqG8YlwfhvB0X&index=76

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZOk3qojoVE&list=PLJ5nSnWzQXi_6yyRLsMMBqG8YlwfhvB0X&index=75

Eliot’s Spur talk at ESUG (3 parts):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0nBNS1aHZ4&index=49&list=PLJ5nSnWzQXi_6yyRLsMMBqG8YlwfhvB0X

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn3irBZE7g4&index=48&list=PLJ5nSnWzQXi_6yyRLsMMBqG8YlwfhvB0X

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vg0iFeg_pA&list=PLJ5nSnWzQXi_6yyRLsMMBqG8YlwfhvB0X&index=47

On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Sebastian Sastre <[hidden email]> wrote:

remarkable!!!

congratulations for the impressive results

thanks for sharing!

sebastian

o/

> On 23/10/2014, at 17:40, Max Leske <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> For those of you who missed this on IRC:
>
> henriksp: estebanlm: Care to run a small bench Cog vs Spur for me?
> [3:32pm] henriksp: int := ZnUTF8Encoder new.
> [3:32pm] henriksp: [int decodeBytes:#[67 97 115 104 44 32 108 105 107 101 32 226 130 172 44 32 105 115 32 107 105 110 103 0]] bench.
> [3:32pm] henriksp: had a 16x speedup with assembly implementation vs Cog, if it's 8x vs Spur, that's just really impressive
> [3:44pm] Craig left the chat room. (Quit: Leaving.)
> [3:53pm] Craig joined the chat room.
> [4:08pm] VitamineD joined the chat room.
> [4:20pm] estebanlm: checking
> [4:21pm] estebanlm: Cog: 167,000 per second.
> [4:22pm] estebanlm: Cog[Spur]: 289,000 per second.
> [4:23pm] estebanlm: henriksp: ping
> [4:33pm] tinchodias left the chat room. (Ping timeout: 245 seconds)
> [4:33pm] tinchodias joined the chat room.
> [4:34pm] henriksp: 70% more work done, nice!
> [5:09pm]
>
>
> Yay! :)

 
On Sun, 26 Oct 2014, Eliot Miranda wrote:

On Oct 26, 2014, at 8:58 AM, stepharo <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yes, I'm very excited.  It's so great to have strong collaborators like Clément, Ronie, Doug and Tim.  But there's lots of room for more to join us.  For a really cool project how about grabbing Bert Freudenberg's VMMakerJS Squeak-vm-on-JavaScript, extract the event handling and rendering part and connect it to the Cog VM via sockets to give us a really fast web plugin?

I thought that the event handling was what JB is doing with the idle process on android.

These are two different, but closely related things.  The event-driven VM and idle process work gives us better event handling (no event queue, important for better integration with GUIs) and a cheaper VM at idle (the CM blocks awaiting an event instead of spinning calling a shirt delay).

Just a friendly reminder before someone starts to reinvent the wheel: the event-driven VM already exists.

Proposal: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2009-November/003385.html
Announcement: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2010-January/003684.html
Repo: https://code.google.com/p/squeak-android-vm/
StackVM variant with other improvments: https://code.google.com/p/squeakvm-tablet/

Levente

To embed the system in a web browser one needs both to render to the browser window and to receive mouse and keyboard events from the window.

So the "plugin" must be connected to the VM's event subsystem e.g. by a socket.  Just as the VM's graphics subsystem must output to the browser window.  There are lots of ways to slice this and it will likely be different for BitBlt and Athens.

Eliot (phone)

Stef

--
best,
Eliot