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Multicore Requires OS Rework, Windows Expert Says
alphadogg writes "With chip makers continuing to increase the number of cores they include on each new generation of their processors, perhaps it's time to rethink the basic architecture of today's operating systems, suggested Dave Probert, a kernel architect within the Windows core operating systems division at Microsoft. The current approach to harnessing the power of multicore processors is complicated and not entirely successful, he argued. The key may not be in throwing more energy into refining techniques such as parallel programming, but rather rethinking the basic abstractions that make up the operating systems model. Today's computers don't get enough performance out of their multicore chips, Probert said. 'Why should you ever, with all this parallel hardware, ever be waiting for your computer?' he asked. Probert made his presentation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Universal Parallel Computing Research Center."
Starting out slow isn't really a solution to the "getting slow" problem.
there have been various complains about a "eternal spinning beachball" in the past, no?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
That is simply not true.
It's very true. However, this:
In fact, that is what Grand Central Dispatch (Snow Leopard, OS X 10.6) is all about. The OS handles the threads, not the programmer.
Has nothing to do with what I wrote.
Not only does it work, it is the wave of the future. Eventually, all machines and OSes will work that way because no programmer wants to jump through outrageous hoops to deal with 128 cores. Or even 4.
The programmer still has to design his programs to do useful things with those threads. That was my point. The best scheduler in the world is useless when confronted with a single-threaded application (or one that is effectively so), or a non-parallelisable problem.
Windows does just fine scheduling across multiple CPUs, has been doing it since before OS X even existed, and was designed from day 1 for it. It can't do anything about poorly written applications, however, and neither can any other OS.
The key may not be in throwing more energy into refining techniques such as parallel programming, but rather rethinking the basic abstractions that make up the Microsoft operating systems model.
There. Fixed it.
Windows is a lot like Apple's old OS 6/7/8 was - old and haggard and full of legacy cruft that just needs a complete ground-up re-write to address. Sure, it looks pretty and runs fairly decently now, but it's plainly also at the end if its life-cycle and showing extreme signs of stress.
Apple took an enormous risk in making a clean break from the past and it seems to be working well for them. Microsoft needs to as well. I doubt that it will, though, as it tends to operate more like GM than anything else. Tons of levels of bureaucracy and a general unwillingness to do serious innovation. After all, what worked in the past should work in the future? Right?
Let's hope that they figure it out sooner rather than later. Or else it's going to get very very lonely at the top.
How comes that, after a Microsloth lackey talks about "rethinking OS's" and gets everyone hot and horny with mental masturbations of what needs to be done to that disgrace to Computer Sciences called Windows, not a single mention has been made to the fact that Sun Microsystems developed the Niagara processor, with 8 cores capable of running 4 concurrent threads each, for a massive total of 32 concurrent threads in a single chip. And how the Solaris O.S. has evolved to a massively multithreaded system capable of using that processing capability. And how that was done in the past century. But since at the time Microsloth was too busy extorting our money with Lentium single core/thread processors, all that technology was conveniently ignored. Now that the low hanging fruit is gone and the going's rough, they will want us to believe they "invented" together with their Intel cohorts the multicore/multithread/paralell processing idea so they can raise the price of Windoze 8?