Yes indeed.. but I'm hopeful. 50 years ago, FORTRAN was hot stuff compared to assembler; and things like virtual memory, paging, and such were "wouldn't it be nice" kind of ideas. 40 years from now, hopefully, there will be optimizing compilers for 10^9 processing nodes, etc.
Jim Lux -----Original Message----- From: beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl Sent: Monday, September 24, 2012 2:11 AM To: beowulf@beowulf.org Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Checkpointing using flash On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 09:29:25PM +0000, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote: > I think the future is in explicitly recognizing that you have to pass > messages serially and designing algorithms that are tolerant of things > like missing messages, variable (but bounded) latency (or heck, > latency at all). Computational physics pretty much demands this. > Once you've got a generalized fast approach using message passing, > it's very scalable. But the human programming doesn't scale across 10^6 to asynchronous 10^9 nodes with <GByte of memory each and where determinism is computationally more expensive than stochastical good-enough result. Of course the physical modelers won't bat an eyelash, but the common programmer who still tries to figure out this multithreading thing will be out to lunch. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
