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From: jsp@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu (John Pieper)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: processing
Message-ID: <26@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Sat, 18-Apr-87 20:34:39 EST
Article-I.D.: b.26
Posted: Sat Apr 18 20:34:39 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 19-Apr-87 15:03:10 EST
Reply-To: jsp@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu (John Pieper)
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 13
Keywords: mondo parallelism


>This is relevant to the "who needs giga-bytes of memory?" controversy, too.
>These kinds of applications will require huge data storage, too.  This is a
>general phenomenon; for a given level of functionality, there is a tradeoff
>between speed and space, but enhanced functionality requires more speed *and*
>more memory.

Yes, and you are arguing for massive parallelism, for "active memories", in
short, for something like the Connection Machine. A hyperactive RISC machine
probably won't be any better at these problems than the CRAY. The complexity
is too great. Besides, look at the most obvious problem: why pay megabucks
for a big, fast, completely underutilized memory? Balancing computation and
I/O is not enough; we must balance these with the amount of memory available.