James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote:
> Architectures that attempt to hide this problem with lots of processors > accessing local stores in parallel are drunks looking for their keys under > the lamp post. > I disagree. The purpose of a computer is solve problems. To process data. Not to crunch numbers as quickly as possible. The human brain is many orders of magnitude slower than any computer, and yet we can recognize faces faster than just about any computer, because the brain is a massively parallel processor (MPP). Many neurons compare the image to stored images simultaneously, and the neurons that find the closest match "come to mind." Many data processing functions can be performed in parallel. Sorting and searching arrays has been done in parallel since the 1950s. Polyphase sort methods with multiple processors and mag tape decks were wonderfully fast. It is difficult to write MPP software, but once we master the techniques the job will be done, and it will be much easier to update. Already, Microsoft Windows works better on multi-processor computers than single processor models. Multiprocessor also run voice input programs much faster than single processors. A generation from now we may have personal computers with millions of processors. Even if every processor were much slower than today's processors, the overall speed for many classes of problems will be similar to today's supercomputers -- which can solve problems hundreds of thousands to millions of times faster than a PC or Mac. They will have the power of today's Watson computer, which is to say, they will be able to play Jeopardy or diagnose disease far better than any person. I expect they will also recognize faces and do voice input better than any person. There may be a few esoteric problems that are inherently serial in nature and that can only be solved by a single processor, but I expect most real world can be broken down into procedures run in parallel. Of course the breaking down will be done automatically. It is already. Before computers were invented, all large real world problems were broken down and solved in parallel by large groups of people, usually organized in a hierarchy. I mean, for example, the design of large buildings or the management of corporations, nations or armies. The fastest data processing in the known universe, by a wide margin, is biological cell reproduction. The entire genome is copied by every cell that splits. This is a parallel process. The moment a strand of DNA is exposed to solution, all of new bases begin match up simultaneously. DNA is also by far the most compact form of data storage in the known universe, and I predict is the most compact that will ever be found. I do not think subatomic data storage will ever be possible. All the human data now existing can be stored in about 7 ml of DNA. - Jed
