A new programming model for distributed computing is desperately needed
The article mentions actor-model frameworks like Akka. Is that not like Ray?
At work we use and maintain something similar called Cloud Haskell (confusingly implemented in a package called distributed-process: https://github.com/haskell-distributed/distributed-process) and I have to say that using it is a breeze.
Oversimplifying it, but if you look as parallelism as a special case of concurrency [0] then ray is a framework for the former and actors are a model for the latter. Actors are lower level and you could build something like Ray on top of it, but if your goal is to process large data in parallel you’d want something like ray. Accordingly ray can’t be used for more general computing.
[0] and it’s an oversimplification because while concurrency can reasoned about conceptually, parallelism implicates implementation realities around computation resources and data locality.
Comments
The article mentions actor-model frameworks like Akka. Is that not like Ray?
At work we use and maintain something similar called Cloud Haskell (confusingly implemented in a package called distributed-process: https://github.com/haskell-distributed/distributed-process) and I have to say that using it is a breeze.
Oversimplifying it, but if you look as parallelism as a special case of concurrency [0] then ray is a framework for the former and actors are a model for the latter. Actors are lower level and you could build something like Ray on top of it, but if your goal is to process large data in parallel you’d want something like ray. Accordingly ray can’t be used for more general computing.
[0] and it’s an oversimplification because while concurrency can reasoned about conceptually, parallelism implicates implementation realities around computation resources and data locality.