robert young
Posts: 361
Nickname: funbunny
Registered: Sep, 2003
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Re: Donald Knuth on Multi-Core, Unit Testing, Literate Programming, and XP
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Posted: May 1, 2008 1:05 PM
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> > Honestly, the idea that we can avoid ever going more > > parallel seems very dubious. > > It's not avoidable, nor can I see a reason why anyone > would want to avoid it, but judicious use of > parallelization is something still being worked out. I > think Dr. Knuth was just saying not to stop looking into > optimization in more traditional ways. > > > What I don't get about the multi-core hullabaloo is > that > > multi-processor machines are not new. I've been > > developing code for multi-processor systems for a > decade. > > The only difference is that it's becoming cheaper. And > > d in a lot of cases, the benefits of multi-core can be > > realized by simply splitting single-threaded processes > > across cores. There's still time to make > multi-threading > > easier and for developers to learn how to use the tools > > that already exist. > > There seem to be groups on polar opposite sides. One group > sees parallelization as a savior for stalling improvements > to code execution. Another group hasn't had to think about > hardware, due to 4GL's and layers of abstractions, for a > decade or so and is disturbed to think about it again. The > latter group I think hopes for a new generation of > compilers to take care of parallelization for them.
It's worth considering the sort of problems that Thinking Machines (of nearly 20 years ago) and Blue Gene of today are good at: weather simulation, thermonucular explosions, matrix arithematic (most statistical calcs) and the odd stock market manipulation; oh, and chess. Finding problems that clearly benefit from large scale parallelization wasn't and isn't simple. As the Intel chips gets closer to "large scale", just because nothing else can be done, identifiable performance increase will get incrementally smaller.
These machines are still von Neumann, just lots-in-the-box.
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