This probably got second-chanced or something because I posted it over a week ago. Funny that this went up here since the follow-up is probably more in-depth.

https://underjord.io/booting-5000-erlangs-on-ampere-one.html

Hope people enjoy it, both the technically interesting bits and the general goofiness of it all. I personally have enjoyed making the number go up.

I hope my co-fouunder on NervesCloud does some write-up on the allocator variations he has been trying. Every day he pops in and asks me to throw 5000 devices at the servers and see what they do. mimalloc, jemalloc and some others. Those two seem to do a better job with fragmentation for the BEAM than whatever we had by default, presumably from glibc.

I got to the end and was mildly surprised that Frank was a real person and not a hallucination. Maybe I've been reading too many psychological thrillers.

I have built something similar but the opposite of the concept, instead of turning one massive computer into a virtual IoT testing lab that simulates hundreds of smart devices, it was creating a unified single ‘entity’ that uses dozens of embedded devices (SBC) resources while offloading processes on demands when possible but sharing knowledge as well, it was useful on a swarm drones platform since one thing processed in any will be shared among others, so say if one avoided an object, that knowledge will be shared among the other ones. It was PoC, how useful it’s in real situations that’s do be determined later.