Fwd: Re: Spring into Erlang with our May E-newsletter

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Stephen Goldby

unread,

May 4, 2012, 5:27:28 AM5/4/12

to fp-...@googlegroups.com, mle...@mega-nerd.com

Erik,
Hopefully some potential interest here for your group also.....

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	Re: Spring into Erlang with our May E-newsletter
Date:	Fri, 4 May 2012 09:07:33 +1000
From:	Tim McGilchrist <timm...@gmail.com>
To:	Erlang Solutions Newsletter <confe...@erlang-solutions.com>

Hi,

I just wanted to let you guys/girls know that we've started up an Erlang User group in Sydney, Australia.

We've got a small but enthusiastic community of Erlang hackers coming along to our bi-monthly meetups.

http://www.meetup.com/Sydney-Erlang-User-Group/

Cheers,

Tim

-----------------------------------------------------

Tim McGilchrist

@lambda_foo

http://github.com/tmcgilchrist

On 04/05/2012, at 3:10 AM, Erlang Solutions Newsletter wrote:

ï¿½

ï¿½May 2012 Erlang E-newsletter

With the Erlang User Conference fast approaching, Erlang Meetups popping up across the world, and a new Erlang community website in the making, Erlang has a lot to shout about in this month's e-newsletter.

ï¿½

ï¿½Erlang User Conference, Stockholm - Early bird rate closes 7th May

With the Erlang Inventors Robert Virding, Joe Armstrong and Mike Williams in attendance, the Erlang User Conference is an event that can't be missed. Talks will take place on 28 and 29 May followed by a day of tutorials on 30 May, all given by the best minds and names in Erlang programming: language inventors, implementers and maintainers, as well as open-source committers, community leaders and Erlang authors. Tracks include: A Connected Society, Cool Tools and Gadgets, Erlang and the VM, Give Me a Break From Erlang, Case Studies and Architectures, Testing Tools and Techniques. We are particularly excited by the training courses available which include the Erlang Express, OTP Express, Building distributed clusters with Riak and an Introduction to Agile development using Scrum.

Tickets are available at Early Bird Rate until 7th May and are selling fast due to the 375 SEK saving. Register now to avoid disappointment!

ï¿½Setting the standard for OpenFlow

What is OpenFlow?
OpenFlow is an API to program network switches. In simple terms, OpenFlow allows you to remotely control how switches manage the behaviour of network devices. OpenFlow provides the flexibility to control billions of connected hosts and devices. Wired magazine recently had an excellent article on the subject.

Why is this exciting for the Erlang World? The Open Networking Foundation are working on the openflow standard. We believe this will be the future of networking and are glad to see that Erlang is not being left behind. Travelping released a controller as open-source in conjunction with their talk at the 2012 Erlang Factory SF (You can find the source code here.) Their presentation of Flower (a framework for building OpenFlow controllers in Erlang) was of particular interest. Erlang Solutions, together with the members of the Open Networking Foundation, are developing an OpenFlow Switch we will be releasing as open-source at the Erlang User Conference. It will be the first switch implementing the 1.2 version of the standard, but be fully backwards compatible.

ï¿½Scalability of the Erlang VM and FreeBSD (reaching 2.5M+ concurrent connections/box)

Rick Reed from WhatsApp gave a brilliant presentation at SF Bay Area 2012 about scalability of the Erlang VM and FreeBSD. The WhatsApp team addressed scalability issues in BEAM, developing patches for it and investigating the best way to write Erlang programmes. They analysed the performance of the Erlang VM using tools like fprof, monitoring relevant information like number of locks, scheduler and message queues. They reduced the number of contentions in BEAM and tweaked OTP in order to improve its throughput. Their suggestions for writing scalable Erlang programs include: preferring os:timestamp to erlang:now and partitioning ets and mnesia tables in order to localise access to smaller number of processes. They reached 2.5M+ concurrent connections/box from an initial server load of ~200k connections. They found that Erlang has *awesome* SMP scalability, as it can reach >85% CPU utilization across 24 logical CPU cores uniformly and the CPU utilization grows almost linearly with the number of connections.

They have published as open source all their changes here. Some of their suggestions are now enabled by default (e.g. number of memory allocators being equal to the number of schedulers in the VM) but most of their changes are not included as they are system-specific.

ï¿½Embedded with a slice of Raspberry Pi

Have you heard about Raspberry-Pi? This little bit of hardware, priced at $25 ($35 with Ethernet), has been extremely popular over the past couple of weeks. What exactly is it and why should we pay attention to it? It is essentially a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV. The design is based on Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes a 700MHz ARM11 processor, VideoCore IV GPU and 256 megabytes of RAM. It is a pretty powerful platform as far as embedded systems go, and with strong demand for these boards it seems like the R-Pi Foundation was caught off-guard; suppliers are now quoting July delivery dates for new orders.

We at Erlang feel rather jammy, as we were lucky enough to have our Pi and eat it, having got hold of one a few days before they started shipping to the general public. However, sweet things are better shared, so we are pleased to announce our series of video tutorials on Erlang Embedded with Raspberry Pi. With two videos already released, popularity is growing by the minute. Follow us on Twitter to get regular updates, give Omer suggestions and see what he will be coming up with next.

ï¿½Hackathon, Krakow

Last monthï¿½s Hackathon revolved around the subject of Erlang-based communication. The first team of programmers explored just how does the CouchDB operates on mobile devices. Theyï¿½ve examined the potential of applying Java-Erlang communication solutions to gather data from different sensors. The second team decided to focus on WebSocets and their communication with ejabberd. The goal was to substitute bosh - a solution not elegant, modern or efficient enough to meet their high standards. Theyï¿½ve managed to rewrite a github module to work according to current WebSocet standard, described in RFC 6455.

The next step is to refactor ejabberd-websocket module and run tests comparing it with bosh. They assume that the WebSocket communication will prove far more effective than solutions currently in use.

To find out about other upcoming events around the world follow us on Twitter.

ï¿½New Meetups in Zurich and New York - why not set up your own?

There must be something in the air as we have seen a number of new Erlang Meetups springing up across the world. Why not set up one in your local area and join the "Erlang movement".

ï¿½Ssssssh, it's a secret...

A little birdy has told us that a new Erlang Community Website is in the making! Click on the bird and be the first to know more.

To remove yourself from this email list click here

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ï¿½

ï¿½May 2012 Erlang E-newsletter




With the Erlang User Conference fast approaching, Erlang Meetups popping up across the world, and a new Erlang community website in the making, Erlang has a lot to shout about in this month's e-newsletter. ï¿½
ï¿½Erlang User Conference, Stockholm - Early bird rate closes 7th May
	With the Erlang Inventors Robert Virding, Joe Armstrong and Mike Williams in attendance, the Erlang User Conference is an event that can't be missed. Talks will take place on 28 and 29 May followed by a day of tutorials on 30 May, all given by the best minds and names in Erlang programming: language inventors, implementers and maintainers, as well as open-source committers, community leaders and Erlang authors. Tracks include: A Connected Society, Cool Tools and Gadgets, Erlang and the VM, Give Me a Break From Erlang, Case Studies and Architectures, Testing Tools and Techniques. We are particularly excited by the training courses available which include the Erlang Express, OTP Express, Building distributed clusters with Riak and an Introduction to Agile development using Scrum. Tickets are available at Early Bird Rate until 7th May and are selling fast due to the 375 SEK saving. Register now to avoid disappointment!
ï¿½Setting the standard for OpenFlow
	What is OpenFlow? OpenFlow is an API to program network switches. In simple terms, OpenFlow allows you to remotely control how switches manage the behaviour of network devices. OpenFlow provides the flexibility to control billions of connected hosts and devices. Wired magazine recently had an excellent article on the subject. Why is this exciting for the Erlang World? The Open Networking Foundation are working on the openflow standard. We believe this will be the future of networking and are glad to see that Erlang is not being left behind. Travelping released a controller as open-source in conjunction with their talk at the 2012 Erlang Factory SF (You can find the source code here.) Their presentation of Flower (a framework for building OpenFlow controllers in Erlang) was of particular interest. Erlang Solutions, together with the members of the Open Networking Foundation, are developing an OpenFlow Switch we will be releasing as open-source at the Erlang User Conference. It will be the first switch implementing the 1.2 version of the standard, but be fully backwards compatible.
ï¿½Scalability of the Erlang VM and FreeBSD (reaching 2.5M+ concurrent connections/box)
	Rick Reed from WhatsApp gave a brilliant presentation at SF Bay Area 2012 about scalability of the Erlang VM and FreeBSD. The WhatsApp team addressed scalability issues in BEAM, developing patches for it and investigating the best way to write Erlang programmes. They analysed the performance of the Erlang VM using tools like fprof, monitoring relevant information like number of locks, scheduler and message queues. They reduced the number of contentions in BEAM and tweaked OTP in order to improve its throughput. Their suggestions for writing scalable Erlang programs include: preferring os:timestamp to erlang:now and partitioning ets and mnesia tables in order to localise access to smaller number of processes. They reached 2.5M+ concurrent connections/box from an initial server load of ~200k connections. They found that Erlang has awesome SMP scalability, as it can reach >85% CPU utilization across 24 logical CPU cores uniformly and the CPU utilization grows almost linearly with the number of connections. They have published as open source all their changes here. Some of their suggestions are now enabled by default (e.g. number of memory allocators being equal to the number of schedulers in the VM) but most of their changes are not included as they are system-specific.
ï¿½Embedded with a slice of Raspberry Pi
	Have you heard about Raspberry-Pi? This little bit of hardware, priced at $25 ($35 with Ethernet), has been extremely popular over the past couple of weeks. What exactly is it and why should we pay attention to it? It is essentially a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV. The design is based on Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes a 700MHz ARM11 processor, VideoCore IV GPU and 256 megabytes of RAM. It is a pretty powerful platform as far as embedded systems go, and with strong demand for these boards it seems like the R-Pi Foundation was caught off-guard; suppliers are now quoting July delivery dates for new orders. We at Erlang feel rather jammy, as we were lucky enough to have our Pi and eat it, having got hold of one a few days before they started shipping to the general public. However, sweet things are better shared, so we are pleased to announce our series of video tutorials on Erlang Embedded with Raspberry Pi. With two videos already released, popularity is growing by the minute. Follow us on Twitter to get regular updates, give Omer suggestions and see what he will be coming up with next.
ï¿½Hackathon, Krakow
	Last monthï¿½s Hackathon revolved around the subject of Erlang-based communication. The first team of programmers explored just how does the CouchDB operates on mobile devices. Theyï¿½ve examined the potential of applying Java-Erlang communication solutions to gather data from different sensors. The second team decided to focus on WebSocets and their communication with ejabberd. The goal was to substitute bosh - a solution not elegant, modern or efficient enough to meet their high standards. Theyï¿½ve managed to rewrite a github module to work according to current WebSocet standard, described in RFC 6455. The next step is to refactor ejabberd-websocket module and run tests comparing it with bosh. They assume that the WebSocket communication will prove far more effective than solutions currently in use. To find out about other upcoming events around the world follow us on Twitter.

ï¿½New Meetups in Zurich and New York - why not set up your own?
	There must be something in the air as we have seen a number of new Erlang Meetups springing up across the world. Why not set up one in your local area and join the "Erlang movement".
ï¿½Ssssssh, it's a secret...
	A little birdy has told us that a new Erlang Community Website is in the making! Click on the bird and be the first to know more.