On 2011-12-17 Sat, at 01:17 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 02:16:41PM -0800, Steve Dekorte wrote: >> Is speed really the bottleneck for making computers more useful? > > Many major scientific problems or even gaming are resource-constrained. > I personally would have no difficulties keeping astronomical numbers > of nodes at 100% CPU for years and decades.
> Consider what a BlueGene/Q on every desktop would mean. Suppose you want to write an app to help people organize events. Neither the development or running the app is compute bound and a machine 1000x faster in itself likely wouldn't much with either. However, using a garbage collected OO language would. So in as much as faster machines lower the cost of higher abstractions, they are helpful for programming. But we are already at the point where most of our time programming is sitting in front of an idle machine trying to tell it what to do. I can't make a hard case for it, but I'd suggest that most of the utility we've gained from computers has been from communication and organization for more efficient resource allocation, that the development of tools for these areas is the largest bottleneck to maximizing the utility of computers and that this is generally not a compute bound problem. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
