Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: ATTACK OF KILLER MICROS
Message-ID: <1989Oct23.165911.564@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
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>
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 89 16:59:11 GMT

In article <27203@dhw68k.cts.com> stein@dhw68k.cts.com (Rick Stein) writes:
>...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).>

What remains to be seen is whether they are pressing on up a blind alley.
Remember where this discussion thread started out:  the mainstream of
high-volume development has vast resources compared to the more obscure
byways.  Results from those byways have to be awfully damned good if they
are going to be competitive except in ultra-specialized niches.  As I've
mentioned in another context, "gonna have to change our whole way of thinking
to go parallel real soon, because serial's about to run out of steam" has
been gospel for quite a while now... but the difficulty of that conversion
has justified an awful lot of highly successful work on speeding up
non-parallel computing.  Work which is still going and still succeeding.

I'm neutral on the nationalism -- you're all foreigners to me :-) -- but
highly skeptical on the parallelism.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu