Experience report: erlang in acoustic ray tracing

  • Authors:

  • Christian Convey;Andrew Fredricks;Christopher Gagner;Douglas Maxwell;Lutz Hamel

  • Affiliations:

  • Naval Undersea Warfare Centers, Newport, RI, USA;Naval Undersea Warfare Centers, Newport, RI, USA;Naval Undersea Warfare Centers, Newport, RI, USA;Naval Undersea Warfare Centers, Newport, RI, USA;University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We investigated the relative merits of C++ and Erlang in the implementation of a parallel acoustic ray tracing algorithm for the U.S. Navy. We found a much smaller learning curve and better debugging environment for parallel Erlang than for pthreads-based C++ programming. Our C++ implementation outperformed the Erlang program by at least 12x. Attempts to use Erlang on the IBM Cell BE microprocessor were frustrated by Erlang's memory footprint.