On 4/28/07, Roman Shaposhnik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I also see that computing in general is now on the brink of a new era where we would have to start exploiting parallelism and adapt our languages and models for that. And no, exploiting parallelism doesn't mean better OpenMP or better MPI. It means rethinking the way we do computing. And that, IMHO, means that Plan9 might just have another chance of entering mainstream computing. Mark my words, in 5-7 years -- POSIX threads and MPI are going to be as important as punch cards and COBOL are now.
I'd like to hope this is true. I wish I had not been hearing this prediction for 10 years :-) True story: I once had a chance to speed up someone's runtime by a factor of 50, yes 50, and all they had to do was change one line in a shell script -- actually, one COMMAND in one LINE. No good -- I had to do it myself. HPC can be a frustrating business. But, let's hope it's true that we get to get rid of our old software baggage. I think it is criminal that people can get away with calling MPI a "programming model". Roman, let's plan to get together at a bar in 8 years -- 2015 -- and drink a toast to the demise of MPI, OpenMP, POSIX threads, and all the crazy stuff we do now :-) Actually, not a bar: I'll host the party at my house I just bought :-) BTW, just to whet appetites here -- assuming Usenix accepts our poster, we're going to have a pretty cool "Plan 9 and HPC" display at Usenix. You heard it here first. Hmm, I think I just joined the marketing dept. ron
