Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!lll-winken!vette!brooks
From: brooks@vette.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: ATTACK OF KILLER MICROS
Message-ID: <36549@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 23 Oct 89 02:46:41 GMT
References: <35825@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <1081@m3.mfci.UUCP> <35896@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <33798@ames.arc.nasa.gov> <35977@lll-winken.LLNL.GO <27203@dhw68k.cts.com>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lines: 30

In article <27203@dhw68k.cts.com> stein@dhw68k.cts.com (Rick Stein) writes
a followup to something attributed to me, but 180 degrees out of phase
with my opinion on the great shared memory vs message passing debate:
>Indeed, the "dusty deck" (aka toxic waste dump) is generally not organized
>to exploit the linear scalable potential of the multicomputer.  To my
>knowledge, no university in the U.S. teaches how to create linear scalable
>software, the cornerstone of multicomputers.  Until the shared-memory
>s/w engineering styles are abandonded, no real progress in multicomputing
>can begin (at least in this country).  Europe and Japan are pressing on
>without (despite us).>


The posting he quoted here was incorrectly attributed to me.  It was in fact
someone's retort to something I wrote.  Scalable shared memory machines, which
provide coherent caches (local memory where shared memory is used as such), are
buildable, usable, and cost effective.  Some students and professors at
Caltech, which included someone by the name of Brooks before his rebirth into
the "real" world of computational physics, were so desperate for computer
cycles that they sidetracked the parallel computer industry by hooking up
a bunch of Intel 8086-8087 powered boxes together in a system with miserable
communication performance.  Industry, in its infinite wisdom, followed their
lead by providing machines with even poorer communication performance.

When you quote, please be sure to get the right author when it is from a
message with several levels of quoting.  I had something to do with the
message passing hypermania, but it is not my party line these days....



brooks@maddog.llnl.gov, brooks@maddog.uucp