Re: Automatic parallelization - was Re: LISP Object Oriented?

John Thingstad wrote:
On Tue, 30 Jan 2007 10:51:11 +0100, Marcus Breiing <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

George Neuner <gneuner2/@comcast.net> writes:

I can envision a distributed solution based on aggressive evaluation
of futures ... starting from any language with call-by-need
semantics.

Programs written for lazy languages will typically serve up lots of
computations that are _never_ used. If you aggressively evaluate them
anyway, doing it in parallel without starving the original threads may
avoid nontermination, but could nevertheless be a horribly inefficient
use of those cores.


Where is Duane Retting.
His first project for Franz was developing a ACL version for Cray (I think,
a supercomputer anyway).
I learnt Amdahl's law from him. (wikipedia)
What else can he teach me?
He should be in this discussion!

The big question is whether inefficient use of cores is a bad thing. If bandwidth to big nonshared memory is the bottleneck, then it may be less important (except perhaps for power consumption) what those core are doing. The ultimate question will be more about a programming model that gets you peak speed when it's possible.

paul
.

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