Re: [Nomen-dev] Multithreading

[Brian H. <bh...@sp...>]

Dave: this started life as a programming language for the Thinking 
Machine.

Which, actually, makes it precursor to what I think is going to be the 
future of computing.  The current generation of CPUs is hitting a wall for 
ILP in a single thread, so they're going to Symetric MultiThreading 
(Hyper Threading is you're an Intel marketroid) to increase the ILP yet 
farther.  So we're getting more threads per CPU.  And ccNUMA is becoming 
defacto for multiprocessors, even on the low end (HyperTransport is 
ccNUMA, I don't care what AMD's marketroids say.  It's just not very 
non-uniform).  On the high end, they're using it as an excuse to push the 
number of CPUs yet higher.  I would not be at all surprised that within 5 
years Sun is selling a box of 128 CPUs, each with 4-way SMT.  And that 5 
years after that, they're selling a box with 512 CPUs each with 16-way 
SMT.  That's 8,192 processors- basically, we're back to the Thinking 
Machine.

That being said, I think cilk's main fault is that it's based on C, not
some sane language.  Of course, Java didn't exist back then, and basing it
off anything else would have meant it would have been marginalized even
harder than it has already.

But I think that combining a virtual machine with the idea of 
ultra-light-weight threads has a lot of merit.  I have some reading up to 
do.

I have reading and thinking to do.

Brian

On Tue, 9 Apr 2002 bre...@eu... wrote:

> I think this is a healthy reading if you are interested in 
> multithreading implementations:
> 
> http://supertech.lcs.mit.edu/cilk/manual-5.3.1.pdf
> 
> Cilk homepage: http://supertech.lcs.mit.edu/cilk
> 
> Cilk is a minimalistic extension of C that allows parallel 
> programming. Actual threads (or processes) are started by the 
> scheduler when a processor is idle, according to the 
> "work-stealing" principle.
> 
> -- Denis.
> 
> 
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