Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!emory!hubcap!landman
From: landman@hanami.Eng.Sun.COM (Howard A. Landman x61391)
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
Subject: Re: parallelism terminology
Message-ID: <8089@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 21 Feb 90 13:33:11 GMT
Sender: fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu
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Approved: parallel@hubcap.clemson.edu

>landman@hanami.Eng.Sun.COM writes
>>One of the interesting things about the Connection Machine is
>>that it clearly had a particular language (CM-Lisp) in mind.

In article <8076@hubcap.clemson.edu> kale@cs.uiuc.edu (L. V. Kale') writes:
>Isn't that a contradiction? Seems to me that CM-Lisp is designed
>for CM. (At least the idea of a data parallel SIMD machine existed
>before the language).

CM languages have changed somewhat from the original ideas, but
the alpha and beta operators in CM-Lisp are a mathematical
abstraction which is quite clean and hardware-independent.

>I think that C* etc. are not expressive enough for non data-parallel
>applications.

That's arguably true of any data-parallel language, but then one
could also argue that using a full MIMD-oriented language to attack
a data-parallel problem is grossly inappropriate.  The restriction
to D-P brings a great deal of conceptual simplicity.  And there are
LOTS of D-P problems worth solving.

I say "arguably" above since it appears possible to emulate MIMD
behavior in SIMD languages (and vice versa of course), but the
performance degradation would probably be totally unacceptable.

	Howard A. Landman
	landman@eng.sun.com -or- sun!landman