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The Father of Multi-Core Chips Talks Shop
pacopico writes "Stanford professor Kunle Olukotun designed the first mainstream multi-core chip, crafting what would become Sun Microsystems's Niagra product. Now, he's heading up Stanford's Pervasive Parallelism Lab where researchers are looking at 100s of core systems that might power robots, 3-D virtual worlds and insanely big server applications. The Register just interviewed Olukotun about this work and the future of multi-core chips. Weird and interesting stuff."
To simplify: Dataflow. It's been too many years, but I recall that DataFlow was a company name. Their lack of commercial success was based on the combination of being way ahead of their time.
The recent advent of multiple on-die asynchronous units ("cores") is leading to a resurgence of interest in the dataflow model.
Anyone who has implemented networked event-driven functionality has already started down the path of dataflow model of computation, though obviously it's not fine-grained. The "non-algorithmic model" looks like a fine-grained implementation of a normal network application. (I agree with a downthread post that claims that current and classical Java-based server applications are already there, accepting the idea that event-driven multithreading applications are essentially coarse-grained dataflow applications.) And when the research gets going hot and heavy, I'll wager that the research will end up focusing on organizing the connectivity model.
As far as I am concerned, one place to look for multicore models to shine would be in spreadsheets and similar applications where there is already a well-defined pattern of interdependency among computational units (which in this case would be the spreadsheet cells). I also think that database rows (or row groupings) would be naturals for dataflow computing.
An efficient dataflow system would be the most KICK-ASS life computation engine! :-) (Now you know how old I am...)
Incidentally, I worked with Transputers,and the concept died for many reasons
1) The comms channel was a wierd, proprietry protocol, and not HDLC - completely fatal
2) In the event of an error, the entire Transputer netowork locked up - competely fatal
3) Mrs Thatcher eventually agreed to fund the project with $50,000,000 the same day that United Technology (can you say 6502, or was it Z80) cancelled a project saying "in the world of Microprocessors $50,000,000 is nothing". - Two fatal errors here (a) expecting the UK government to fund anything reasonably sensible, and (b) Making it clear that the project is insufficiently funded to survive
4) The project was taken over by the French - whose previous achievements in both hardware and software are [white space here]. 5) Inmos, who made it, (a) tried to force people to use a new language, at a time when there was a new language every month, (b) took two years to discover that the target market wanted C, and (c) never discovered the appropriate language was Algol68.
In short, the company was run by a clever but narrow minded geek, who failed to take advice from others in the industry (including other narrow minded geeks, like me, etc).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Hence the downmod. You just do not learn.
Really? I take it you don't use the internet or a computer then? Fail.
I just do not see this: considering the amount of guts you've got, where is the COSA toolchain? The COSA OS, with the COSA web-browser, with the COSA frigging interactive editor? Why should I believe anything you say? You HAVE DONE NOTHING.
Who's ass am I kissing? Turing? Hawking? Zeno? Have you heard of proof by intimidation? It is not effective. I mean, there are discrete topologies with "infinite divisibility" which are (consequentially) non-continuous, take
Where the frig is the contradiction?! I WANT TO SEE; PLEASE SHOW ME!
I am not here to make an enemy or collect blood-karma from you. I am here to make a point. I am here because I see fallow potential in you.