🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jun24.172633.5978@nas.nasa.gov> eugene@nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) writes:
>The Conference just held in Santa Clara was dull.
>I would hope that most companies in attendence didn't lose money.

It wasn't a conference.  It was a trade show.  I hope the organizer *did* lose
money. :->

							spl (the p stands for
							pondering the copy of
							Pixel thrust upon me
							by a mysterious person
							with a back pack...)
-- 
Steve Lamont, SciViGuy -- (408) 646-2752 -- a guest at network.ucsd.edu --
NPS Confuser Center / Code 51 / Naval Postgraduate School / Monterey, CA 93943
"When people are programming virtual 5-D webs of glowing spidersilk by pure
thought power -- there will still be hackers."  T.Neff in alt.folklore.computers

In article <1991Jun24.172633.5978@nas.nasa.gov>, eugene@nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) writes:
> The Conference just held in Santa Clara was dull.
> I would hope that most companies in attendence didn't lose money.
> 

I got a lot out of this conference.  Good presentations by users from
industry, a lot of equipment in a small area, plenty of lively
discussions on parallel processing.

I was especially encouraged by the progress in mass storage systems.
We need Terabytes near-line with 10 MB/s transfer rates,
100 Gbytes on-line with 100 MB/s rates. Products are now showing up 
that can deliver these rates.

The panel discussion featuring top executives from Cray, Convex, Intel,
and NCube was especially illuminating.  Everybody's talking MPP.
Good news for us users.  

-- 
----+----1----+----2----+----3----+----4----+----5----+----6----+----7--
| Chuck Mosher     | Internet : ccm@arco.com     | Who needs an editor |
| ARCO, Plano, TX  | Telephone: (214)754-6468    | when you have ISPF? |
************************************************************************

Oh, one possible outcome of this meeting....
I was talking with Bence Gerber of CRI, Ron Levine, and others.
Richard Friedman are you reading this?

We are thinking of holding a ten year reunion (next year) of our
failed attempt to start ACM/SIGBIG (in the local Bay Area).
It will be ten years ago that Mary Fowler, George Michael, Marcie Smith,
and I tried.  We can hold a wake for Sid.  We should also invite
Ken Muira, Ron Z.* [the last name in the IBM Santa Teresa phone as
he called himself.]  We could also invite some of the local speakers
we had at the time on various platforms and applications (John George
and Nelson Bye from Convex are still around).

Mary unfortunately did not get enough support from management
and is now at PG&E Nuclear.  I resigned because I felt I appeared a
political detriment for a few who didn't think WWII ended,
but I ran the SIGGRAPH local group for a successful term (and we
did cover supercomputing).

--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov
  Resident Cynic, Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers
  {uunet,mailrus,other gateways}!ames!eugene

In article <1991Jun26.140913.1238@Arco.COM> dprcxm@marais.ARCO.COM (Chuck Mosher) writes:
>The panel discussion featuring top executives from Cray, Convex, Intel,
>and NCube was especially illuminating.  Everybody's talking MPP.
>Good news for us users.  

Talk and action are two different things.  It took 10 years to go from
talk of small scale multiprocessors (early 70's) to commercial availability
at the high end (say Cray XMP for example).  Of course, time to market
pressures are greater today, and there are several examples currently
on the market (i.e. Connection Machine and Touchstone).  However, these
appear (from what I have heard, no direct experience) to require substantial
code/algorithm revisions to get anywhere near the potential of the machine.

What is the opinion of the super community?
Will most super applications be rewritten to make them more adaptable
to massive parallelism?  
or
Will special hand crafting for each target architecture continue to be
needed to any kind of reasonable performance from MPP systems?

If the applications will be rewritten, how long will it be before
the revised versions are available?  [Chicken and egg problem here:
without machines and language features, where is the motivation to
rewrite?  Without applications, where is the motivation to provide
the machines and language features?]

A minor example of massive parallelism requirements concerns pseudo-random
number generation.  Many random number generators are sequential by design.
(r(i) = a* r(i-1) + b)
However, the desired mathematical properties can be obtained by having N
parallel random streams: 
(r(i,j) = a*r(i-1,j) + b)   for j = 1,..,N
Then each of N threads of execution can generate repeatable pseudo-random
numbers.

Massive parallelism is a difficult transition for us.  We run IBM and
Cray mainframes for a wide range of applications.  Hundreds of users
run database applications during the day, a few large number-crunching
routines run at night.

The large applications are targets for parallel processing.  They are
few enough in number that we can consider re-writing the codes from
scratch for a particular architecture.  So far, we have found that
a different parallel decomposition and different language constructs
are necessary for each architecture out there, so we have to go
through a complete re-write for every machine we look at.  We clearly
need some standards.

So, we re-write our codes, they run faster and cheaper on the XYZ box.
But the XYZ box can't support our hundreds of users during the day,
so we have to keep our IBM and Cray systems going.  As a result, we
can't afford the big XYZ box that will let us tackle the problems
we can't solve today.

We end up being able to utilize small parallel systems, but only on 
a departmental level.  We need true multi-user support and good 
parallelizing compilers before we will be able to replace our big
mainframes and get on to the grand challenges.

-- 
----+----1----+----2----+----3----+----4----+----5----+----6----+----7--
| Chuck Mosher     | Internet : ccm@arco.com     | Who needs an editor |
| ARCO, Plano, TX  | Telephone: (214)754-6468    | when you have ISPF? |
************************************************************************

In article <1991Jun26.184744.16948@convex.com> patrick@convex.COM
(Patrick F. McGehearty) writes:
>Will most super applications be rewritten to make them more adaptable
>to massive parallelism?  
>or
>Will special hand crafting for each target architecture continue to be
>needed to any kind of reasonable performance from MPP systems?
>
>If the applications will be rewritten, how long will it be before
>the revised versions are available?  [Chicken and egg problem here:
>without machines and language features, where is the motivation to
>rewrite?  Without applications, where is the motivation to provide
>the machines and language features?]

It is interesting that you did not get much response.  You should get
60% of your responses in 24 hours.

I think a lot of sites reel when they change machines.  I am porting
two codes right now for which the -cfc option isn't helping.  Subtle semantic
problems.

Will apps. be re-written?  Probably, but only enough to adapt them to
one more architecture (at a time).  The purpose (as you know) is to run
the code, not to adapt it to every conceiveable computer.

Special hand crafting?  That's the tension.  The attraction is speed.
If you are not using it, then by some people's definition, "that's not
efficient."  You have the chicken-egg analogy down pat.  A CM code
won't run on a hypercube nor a shared-memory machine without modification.
Frequently extensive mods.

I think what will drive this will be academic competitiveness.  A prof
some where will go assign a grad student some CM or cube time, then
come up with some new algorithm, for solving saying a problem.
Colleagues will rush in and use it.  THEY will have to make decisions
what existing codes to drop.  Some codes, very large, will be declared National
resources, say like NASTRAN, and big efforts will be made to port those
codes.  The rest will fad away, perhaps to run on older, little-used
machines sitting in corners, single CPU killer micros to older Crays

I don't think you can put a technology based time frame on it.
It will happen when a new advance in a field takes place.  It will
probably rendered graphically (we can guess this).  We will see hype
articles on events which will motivate colleagues to rush and get
similar machines, maybe a vendor will get a brief burst of orders.
Meanwhile we have to get vendors together and achieve consensus on language
features.  We may literally have to get vendors running each other's
codes to get consistent language features.  We also have to encourage
applications users to come up with more small benchmarks, consensus
again, which vendors can use as test cases.  We teeth with toys.  We must.
In the time it takes some vendors to port a test application, a company
may go out of business.  That scares a lot of people because that is
time wasted.

Notables missing from the Trade Show:
	IBM
	Thinking Machines
	Others

--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@orville.nas.nasa.gov
  Resident Cynic, Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers
  {uunet,mailrus,other gateways}!ames!eugene

eugene@nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) writes:

>Oh, one possible outcome of this meeting....
>I was talking with Bence Gerber of CRI, Ron Levine, and others.
>Richard Friedman are you reading this?

>We are thinking of holding a ten year reunion (next year) of our
>It will be ten years ago that Mary Fowler, 
Yes indeed I'm reading this!  Sounds like a good idea, especially
now that things are changing so fast in the big computer world.
Long time CDC/CRAY sites are changing their stripes.  Just
noticed that the Univ of London is replacing their Cray YMP
with a CONVEX. A move away from Minnesota computer technology
to Texas!  And Cray lost out to Tokyo over in Canada with the
Weather service.  SO we'd better have a meeting and
nostalize one last time ..
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