Re: networked processors and parallelism
Jeff Fox writes:
> About the only people who understand multiprocessing think
> that the only thing it is good for is supercomputing FP
> number crunching. When I would talk about F21 at the
Err, but these are very important applications.
Give Beowulfs some time. Small footprint 64 node machines are already
being made, it's only a question of time before you'll be able to buy
a multi-node Beowulf box with stackable CPU boards. There QNX and
Fiasko, so the kernel footprint will get better, if there's demand for
it.
> parallel processing connection they could never get it
> at all. These people think 'C' and Unix are toy languages
> so you can imagine how much they understand of Forth.
Uh, the era of Fortran *is* passing, albeit slowly. They've got
awfully good Fortran compilers for the Alpha, and there's still lots
of legacy out there.
Right now the supercomputer market is dominated by Unix and C.
> They think you need a lot more for what they do than you
> need for C or Unix. They really can't begin to grasp
> the concept of something with 100 times less than C and
> Unix.
Jeff, F21 is very much useless for scientific computing, apart from
very very few exceptions.
Moroever, the price of a shelved Linux box, bought in quantities, can
be surprisingly low. Systems on MISC are not exactly cheap, nor easily
available.
I think the future of MISC is programmable logic and minimal systems,
which have a niche for embeddeds, cryptography, etc.
