Despite the fact that people can get hurt in a bank robbery, the bank still has some kind of insurance on the stolen money. Software manufacturers don't have that luxury.
Easy on the adding of features. How about fixing Firefox to use automatic garbage collecting before throwing the responsibility of doing it at us? (read: keeping open tabs at a minimum)
What's the most important thing in high-performance computing nowadays; is it super-optimized low-level parallel programming or is it just plain parallel programming? I'm talking about any high-level framework which allows for easy multi-threading in applications which need it. A framework that will not only heighten developer productivity, but also utilize the additional cores in a computer system with a minimal effort. Wouldn't that be better than not doing it at all?
The C-omega language http://research.microsoft.com/Comega/ by Microsoft Research Labs does exactly this.
I have to agree, though, that the problem here is us - the programmers. The implementation of the language can only as smart as it is, and potential side-effects in terms of data dependencies etc. will definately occour. I'm not aware of any languages which implement a degree of Data Flow Analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_flow_analysis, which allows the compiler to alert of such "stupidities" propagated by us--or perhaps even optimize them for the better.
As several of you pointed out, matrix calculations can easily be distributed onto n number of cores, computers, or whatnot without any problems. I can't mention any real-life application where fast matrix calculations could save lives, but hey..
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the fact that people can get hurt in a bank robbery, the bank still has some kind of insurance on the stolen money. Software manufacturers don't have that luxury.
Easy on the adding of features. How about fixing Firefox to use automatic garbage collecting before throwing the responsibility of doing it at us? (read: keeping open tabs at a minimum)
Pardon me if this point has already been made.
What's the most important thing in high-performance computing nowadays; is it super-optimized low-level parallel programming or is it just plain parallel programming? I'm talking about any high-level framework which allows for easy multi-threading in applications which need it. A framework that will not only heighten developer productivity, but also utilize the additional cores in a computer system with a minimal effort. Wouldn't that be better than not doing it at all? The C-omega language http://research.microsoft.com/Comega/ by Microsoft Research Labs does exactly this.
I have to agree, though, that the problem here is us - the programmers. The implementation of the language can only as smart as it is, and potential side-effects in terms of data dependencies etc. will definately occour. I'm not aware of any languages which implement a degree of Data Flow Analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_flow_analysis, which allows the compiler to alert of such "stupidities" propagated by us--or perhaps even optimize them for the better.
As several of you pointed out, matrix calculations can easily be distributed onto n number of cores, computers, or whatnot without any problems. I can't mention any real-life application where fast matrix calculations could save lives, but hey..