Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!wave
From: wave@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Michael B. Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.visualization
Subject: Re: Requirements?
Message-ID: <4023@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 13 Nov 90 22:55:15 GMT
References: <1990Nov13.211634.28152@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Reply-To: wave@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Michael B. Johnson)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 65

In article <1990Nov13.211634.28152@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> andyrose@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Andy Rose) writes:
>>Craig Upson asks "does the 'visual programming' paradigm work?"
>>
>>The visual programming paradigm is a perhaps recent development.  It

... a nice description of the way AVS handles this stuff...

>>The "visual programming" paradigm works.

Well, yes and no.  First of all, the coarseness of the networks being built
hides an obvious lack - functional abstraction.  Visual programming is a
wonderful prototyping environment, but when it comes time to use it to 
build a large system, you really want the ability to "black-box" networks.
What begins to happen is that you want to functionally abstract certain
subnetworks into modules in a larger network.

Also, the graphical programming paradigm is similar to an interperter for 
a conventional computer language.  It's easy to change things, try things
out, and you pay a certain performance penalty.  It would be nice if there
were "AVS/apE/etc compilers", that is, something which could take a network 
description and link the code appropriately such that you have a single
efficient program to run.  Note that I'm not saying this would necessarily
be a single executable on a single machine - rather you could have 
network hooks between programs on seperate machines, but for those which
are on the same machine, you could take advantage of shared memory and 
other such niceities to speed up computation and lessen the gratuitous 
data movement.
 
>>
>>He asks "what's lacking from all these systems?"
>>
>The greatest kick down in the global research environment will come when these
>>systems are truly remote and distributed.  I would like to double click
>>an AVS icon and see a list of machines on my network where this module
>>will run.  Or, better, the system will balance the loads on the machines to
>>give peak or fairest performance.  The pipes would indicate transfer speed
>>visually with thickness or color.  If I have a ps/2 with vga or something
>>like that I wish to design nets.  I shouldn't have to have a bigbuck machine
>>to do simple box dragging.  Beyond the distributed wish, I would like a user
>>"community" to have access to my net.
>>

Absolutely.  My personal vision of this that a researcher will describe their
problem in a virtual laboratory, using any of many available "problem 
description tools" (data flow diagrams, Mathematica, etc.).  The computation
of that problem would be handled by, for want of a better term, autonomous
intelligent agents.  I could go on, but some other time... 


>>A lot of the solution to this has nothing to do with graphics.  Alas.

As a fellow PhD student in my group said to me the other day, 
"Ya know, we must really love graphics, since we spend so much of our time 
 working on other things."


>>-- 
>>Andrew Newkirk Rose '91 Department of Visualization CNSF/Theory Center


-- 

-->  Michael B. Johnson
-->  MIT Media Lab      --  Computer Graphics & Animation Group
-->  (617) 253-0663     --  wave@media-lab.media.mit.edu