Re: Embedded languages based on early Ada (from "Re: Preferred OS, processor family for running embedded Ada?")

[Jonathan Bromley <jonathan.bromley@MYCOMPANY.com>]

On Sat, 03 Mar 2007 13:40:16 GMT, "Dr. Adrian Wrigley"
<amtw@linuxchip.demon.co.uk.uk.uk> wrote:

>  What syntax do I use, and which
>compiler, OS and processor do I need to specify and exploit
>fine-grain concurrency?
>
>In 1987, the answers were "par", Occam, Transputer. Twenty
>years later, Ada (or VHDL, C++, C#), Linux (or Windows), Niagara
>(or Tukwila, XinC, ClearSpeed, Cell) do not offer us anything
>remotely similar.  In fact, in twenty years, things have
>got worse :(

Absolutely right.  And whose fault is that?  Not the academics,
who have understood this for decades.  Not the hardware people
like me, who of necessity must understand and exploit massive 
fine-grained parallelism (albeit with a static structure).  No, 
it's the programmer weenies with their silly nonsense about 
threads being inefficient.

Glad to have got that off my chest :-)  But it's pretty frustrating
to be told that parallel programming's time has come, when
I spent a decade and a half trying to persuade people that it
was worth even thinking about and being told that it was
irrelevant.

For the numerical-algorithms people, I suspect the problem of
inferring opportunities for parallelism is nearer to being solved
than some might imagine.  There are tools around that
can convert DSP-type algorithms (such as the FFT that's 
already been mentioned) into hardware that's inherently
parallel; there are behavioural synthesis tools that allow
you to explore the various possible parallel vs. serial 
possibilities for scheduling a computation on heterogeneous
hardware.  It's surely a small step from that to distributing 
such a computation across multiple threads or CPUs.  All 
that's needed is the will.
-- 
Jonathan Bromley, Consultant

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