Raul - yes - there's always been a lot of hand-waving magic about the
benefits of parallel processing but many a pretty ship of theory has
foundered on the cold hard rocks of fact.  Until you consider a specific
problem and do the work, you can't make any claims about the benefits.

In fact, it's easy to offer a "dis-proof of concept": parallelize

   1 2+3 4

I bet any parallel version of this will lose to the non-parallel version -
there's no way the overhead cost of breaking up and re-assembling the
results of this small piece of work is less than simply doing it.

We talked about this at the last NYCJUG and I'm glad to see it's still a
pressing topic as this will motivate me to update the wiki for February's
meeting.

Regards,

Devon

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 12:33 PM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 11:00 AM, bill lam <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Apart from the startup time and memory cost, the biggest problems are
> > the need to tailor the algorithm by programmer for each for its
> > applications, synchronisation of sessions, the memory bandwidth it
> > took to transfer data between session. OTOH the low level solution is
> > transparent, J programmers will not even need to aware its existence.
> > Henry Rich had also suggested this approach if memory served me.
>
> One problem with the low level approach seems to be that, so
> far, no one wants to fund the investigative costs associated with
> this change.
>
> To my knowledge no one has even shown a "proof of concept"
> implementation for any primitive.
>
> --
> Raul
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>



-- 
Devon McCormick, CFA
^me^ at acm.
org is my
preferred e-mail
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