Can Perl take advantage of dual 64bit Opteron?

rulethirty has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings,

I have just purchased a system that fits the following specs:

Dual 64bit 244 Opteron 1.8GHz
1GB 3200 400MHz DDR Memory
2 x 250GB SATA West Digi Drives
...other details left out...

My question is: Can I put a dual 64 bit system to _full_ use? This, of course, supposing I have a 64bit kernel and all perl binaries and libraries supporting 64bit arch. Also, what modules are out there for me that I may need and what tools will I need to do some major number crunching?

Your help and input are much appreciated!

Thanks,

rulethirty

Retitled by davido.

Comment on Can Perl take advantage of dual 64bit Opteron?

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Re: Can Perl take advantage of dual 64bit Opteron? by mowgli (Friar) on Jan 07, 2005 at 14:03 UTC
An easy way to take advantage of a dual-processor system would be to formulate your problem in a way that allows you to split it up into two (or more) parts. Fork off a second process (that will hopefully be put on the second CPU by the OS's scheduler), let both of them crunch away on their parts of the problem, and use the standard IPC facilities to communicate between the processes. If you expect to do your crunching on bigger iron, parallelize your problem more (it's always a good idea to do so, anyway), and use MPI from the beginning - that will save you a lot of hassle later on. -- mowgli	[reply]
Re^2: Can Perl take advantage of dual 64bit Opteron? by rulethirty (Initiate) on Jan 07, 2005 at 18:36 UTC
I have a colleague who uses MPI for his projects and I am sure he can tutor me more with it. What about the 64bit stuff? Is perl automatically handling that part so long as the perl binaries and libraries are written for the 64bit arch?	[reply]
Re^3: Can Perl take advantage of dual 64bit Opteron? by mowgli (Friar) on Jan 07, 2005 at 23:05 UTC
I think so, but don't quote me on that. -- mowgli	[reply]