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Futuristic UC Berkeley OS Tessellation Controls Discrete 'Manycore' Resources
coondoggie writes "At the Design Automation Conference (DAC) here this week, John Kubiatowicz, professor in the UC Berkeley computer science division, offered a preview of Tessellation, describing it as an operating system for the future where surfaces with sensors, such as walls and tables in rooms, for example, could be utilized via touch or audio command to summon up multimedia and other applications. The UC Berkeley Tessellation website says Tessellation is targeted at existing and future so-called 'manycore' based systems that have large numbers of processors, or cores on a single chip. Currently, the operating system runs on Intel multicore hardware as well as the Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors (RAMP) multicore emulation platform."
I know I'm going to hell for this, but I read "futuristic" and "tessellation" in the summary and immediately thought of Loki from The Avengers. Terrible villain really, just went bad because he had daddy issues. *cough* Crap... going off topic and triggering a flame war from marvel lovers. Yeah. I'm taking the special bus to hell now...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Some of what they're doing with resource guarantees is like QNX's "sporadic scheduling". The idea is that you can guarantee a thread something like 1ms of CPU time every 10ms. This is useful for near-real-time tasks which need a bounded guarantee of responsiveness but don't need to preempt everything else immediately. Most UI activity is in this category. With lots of UI devices, including ones like vision systems that need serious compute resources, you need either something like this, or dedicated hardware for each device.
On top of sporadic scheduling there should be a resource allocator which doesn't let you overcommit resources. So if something is allowed to run, it will run at the required speed.
This is very useful in industrial process control and robotics. The use case for human interfaces is less convincing.
Tessellation means to cover a polygon with smaller polygons. That's it.
Now whenever you google it, it turns up all this garbage from clueless gamers who think it's some kind of Crysis 3 feature. Now on top of that we have to deal with this?
"Is security an issue? Yes, Kubiatowicz acknowledges, suggesting cryptography, for one thing needs to be part of it."
When are people going to learn? Unless you design an operating system to be secure from the very start, it is never going to be really secure.
Some valuable lessons may be learned from this, but I don't see it having much of a future.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Well, it's definitely for nerds, but the Tesselation paper was published in 2009, so hardly news. For those that don't have ACM DL access, the paper is interesting, but suffers from many of the same problems as LibOS / Exokernel approaches.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Whatever. Whoopie-wow, man.
All interfaces between computers and people are just inconsequential incremental improvements on a single key input device.
Dit dit dit dah dah dit dit... The keyboard is just like a single key, with 100 and something times the vocabulary size. A mouse is similarly simple.
I assert that no change is made by adding extra buttons either to keyboard or mouse, nor by integrating a keyboard into a wall, or a desk, or turning a door-knob into a scroll-wheel, etc. Computers won't change substantially, move beyond the GUI in any meaningful way until they do away with the interface entirely, as it stands.
I am waiting for the day when they come up with a functional metaphor for a person sitting at a computer. I don't want there to be a keyboard or a mouse, I want that thing to take dictation. I don't mean dictation. one. word. at. a. time. like. this. I mean the entire OS is like Apple's Siri, except that it doesn't require an internet connection, it actually understands what I tell it in plain English, (or whatever,) and actually works. Let's say I want to surf the internet. The computer with this ideal interface is hooked up to a screen. (Yeah, it still needs an output, obviously...) I turn it on by saying "computer on"
It fires up, (by which I mean since it obviously had to be at least partially 'on' to hear and understand the command, that it enters fully-on mode,) and it states, "your wish is my command, master" or whatever string I want it to say. It might display a human-like face, just for full feedback between me and the machine, so I can read the expressions on its artificially generated face. (That is after all, a big part of human intercommunication.) I say "launch browser." It complies. "Which page would you like," it asks.
"um, gimme NBC News, and load Pandora, 80's channel in the background." I tell it, and add, "also open up an e-mail to my mom."
It understands all that, opens Firefox 938.2, (which will be the version out by the time this idea is available...) and navigates to that page. It launches the Pandora internet radio program, and goes to the 80's channel and starts playing, and then it opens the e-mail client and begins an e-mail to my mother. The display indicates that Pandora and the e-mail are minimized/running background, and shows NBC, which of course is detailing yet another act of senseless violence committed against a dozen or so random innocent people by some dickhead with an assault weapon that our government is too cowardly to do anything about, of course, just as it will be then with the corrupt Demopublicans nominally running things.
"Tell my mom I won't be able to make it for dinner tonight, since downtown is completely jammed with emergency vehicles helping all the people injured by the latest shooter to attempt to murder large numbers of people, and every other way to get to her house is to go over roads and bridges that aren't safe for vehicular traffic because the country's infrastructure is falling apart and the government is too paralyzed to do anything about it anymore, so I'd have to go through downtown."
The computer understands all this, and simply e-mails my mom the word "shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit." And my mom of course, understands exactly what is meant, as her computer gets the e-mail, and tells her, "your son won't be able to come for dinner tonight, as he can't get here from there without going through downtown, which as I just got through telling you, is jammed with emergency vehicles since some dickhead went and shot a bunch of people with a weapon he shouldn't have had because no civilian needs to have one of those but our useless cowardly government can't even buy the balls to do anything about it, and all the other ways to get from there to here are crumbling, unsafe freeways and bridges.
All that would be accomplished without a keyboard or a mouse, and it would almost make up for the fact that every other day you turn on the TV or radio, and read about how some
So there is a new weird name for an OS, but how is it really different from any other OS in that every other modern OS can do the same and will be doing the same: allow many input devices and it is up to drivers to take care of what type of device is allowed.
Wow, Roman, just wow. We knew you failed math, physics, chemistry, biology, and (your favorite lecture subject) economics while taking courses at one of the largest publicly funded research universities in the western hemisphere. But apparently you failed operating systems as well? What you just stated describes quite nearly every operating system ever made and would suggest that every OS is the same regardless of its lineage. I have never met a reasonable person who would suggest, for example, that DOS, Mac OS, Mac OS X, BSD, QNIX, Solaris, and BeOS are all exactly the same, yet you just did exactly that.
Of course, you are not a reasonable person. Is a bizarre statement such as what you just made just another step in your goal of establishing a fascist government in the united states (and of course eventually the world)?