Very large scale parallelism

Very large scale parallelism

[mockturtle]

Dear.all, 
few days ago I was in Pisa at a launch event of a EU program about HPC. Some of the speakers talked about the need of tools to program computers with a large number of cores (even millions).  

This is not my field, but I thought a bit about it.  Although I have the feeling that maybe the right tool is very problem dependent (e.g., solving differential equations, search for matches over large databases, hi-quality rendering, ...)  I could not help thinking that my preferred language (INTERCAL, what else? :-) could be a very nice tool, especially if a compiler specialized to a specific architecture is available.

This raised the following curiosity: are you aware about any application of Ada to very large scale parallelism?

Just out of curiosity.

Thank you in advance

Riccardo.

Re: Very large scale parallelism

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

On Sat, 8 Feb 2014 07:14:23 -0800 (PST), mockturtle wrote:

> Some of the speakers talked about the need of tools to program computers
> with a large number of cores (even millions). 

Are you sure they mean cores? Millions of cores would bring less than
nothing as the memory will be the bottleneck.

Speaking about the future of parallelism it IMO lies with transputer-like
architectures rather than with multi-cores. Ada looks good with either
paradigm, better with multi-cores, though.

Considering transputers and massive parallelism, I think that Annex E is a
non starter. In the hey day of transputers I fancied the idea of tasks
running on separate transputers making entry calls transparently through
the links. One problem with that is the model of shared memory Ada entry
calls deploy. To make parallelism working on such architectures Ada must
better abstract away by-reference/by-value semantics, allowing marshaling
working for most objects.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: Very large scale parallelism

[mockturtle]

On Saturday, February 8, 2014 6:26:38 PM UTC+1, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Feb 2014 07:14:23 -0800 (PST), mockturtle wrote:
> 
> > Some of the speakers talked about the need of tools to program computers
> > with a large number of cores (even millions). 
> 
> 
> Are you sure they mean cores? Millions of cores would bring less than
> nothing as the memory will be the bottleneck.
> 

Hmmm... You catch me a bit off-balance here.  I am almost (say 90%) sure, but I would swear on it...  As I said, this is not really my field (so, why was I there? Long story...).