🚀 go-pugleaf

Organization : California Institute of Technology
Keywords: 
From: jon@oddhack.Caltech.Edu (Jon Leech)
Path: oddhack!jon

In article <347@ames.UUCP> eugene@pioneer.UUCP (Eugene Miya N.) writes:
>Doug Pase writes:
>>Hypercubes are hard to use only if you don't know anything about them, or
>>about what they're good for.
>
>I won't mince words: Hypercubes are difficult to program.  I've not seen
>a parallel machine which is not difficult to program in some way.  I

	I believe that conventional FBAPP languages and even LISP are 
not appropriate paradigms for programming such machines, which is partly
why they're so horrible right now (putting junk like the 80286 inside
doesn't help either). It's a pity that so much effort is going into
producing hardware instead of software to use it effectively.
One of the potential problems I see in better programming paradigms,
however, is that there are often several ways to decompose a problem - 
in image rendering, for example, you can decompose in frame space,
image space, object space, or combinations thereof - and a language 
designed to abstract away parallelism may also restrict which 
decompositions can be easily implemented.

    -- Jon Leech (jon@csvax.caltech.edu || ...seismo!cit-vax!jon)
    Caltech Computer Science Graphics Group
    __@/