Notes on two presentations by Gordon Bell ca. 1998
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From: Robert Myers on 2 Feb 2010 15:13 On Feb 1, 8:32 pm, eug...(a)cse.ucsc.edu (Eugene Miya) wrote: > In article <ea2c8491-2403-499f-94dd-1fb3d37cd...(a)o28g2000yqh.googlegroups..com>, > Robert Myers <rbmyers...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >Do larger scale, faster, longer run times, increase problem insight > >and not just total flop or flops (second R Myers prize to G Bell in > >one presentation) > >Challenge to funders: Is the cost justified? (THREE R Myers prizes to > >G Bell in one presentation). > > It's like Alice and the Red Queen: to stay in place, you have to run faster. > If you don't, you might consider getting out of the game. Just try it. > No one gets ahead (money-wise) with longer run times. > > Do I think it's justified? Personally, no. > But, it is about attention span (an 80s PIEEE paper by a former boss). > > But you also only see part of the playing field as most people do. > I certainly was able to see the whole playing field as it was summarized in the Blue Waters document. If I, as a taxpayer, can't see what you are doing, and it's not classified, what right do you have to be spending my money? As to the running faster to stay in the same place analogy, that's what I have long suspected is going on, and it's one of the most disheartening things you have said to me. Computers have fulfilled their promise only in the area of computer graphics and animation. Maybe computers will one day succeed as the artificially-intelligent devices that once were imagined. So far, I see little progress, and I don't think that more flops is going to speed progress in that area. As to computational physics, I have long had serious doubts as to whether bigger computers at this point are producing anything more than more visually-engaging graphics. They may well be an obstacle to insight and real progress--especially as the vested interests that are more interested in the computers than in the science become ever more vested, visible, and powerful. As has been noted many times, these behemoths are much harder to use than earlier machines. They promote concentration of intellectual enterprise (and corresponding groupthink). And they distract attention and resources from the actual science. Robert.
From: Robert Myers on 2 Feb 2010 15:21 On Feb 2, 3:44 am, n...(a)cam.ac.uk wrote: > In article <4b6780bb$1(a)darkstar>, Eugene Miya <eug...(a)cse.ucsc.edu> wrote: > >Robert Myers <rbmyers...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > >> My desktop will run circles around the > >>supercomputers I used to use and that I still think of as the genuine > >>article.) > > >That's because of the past tense. That little 'd' at the end of "use." > >You could go back.... > > Each of my hearing aids is tens of thousands of times more powerful > than the first supercomputer I used :-) > Anyone who used the old machines can remember how much science could be done with them. Can we now do billions of times more science? As far as I'm concerned, it all went wrong when computer rooms became warehouses. Robert.
From: nmm1 on 2 Feb 2010 15:58 In article <57f7bab3-3dda-4fef-8e1a-6c1f72f46191(a)h2g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>, Robert Myers <rbmyersusa(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> >> My desktop will run circles around the >> >>supercomputers I used to use and that I still think of as the genuine >> >>article.) >> >> >That's because of the past tense. =A0That little 'd' at the end of "use.= >" >> >You could go back.... >> >> Each of my hearing aids is tens of thousands of times more powerful >> than the first supercomputer I used :-) > >Anyone who used the old machines can remember how much science could >be done with them. Can we now do billions of times more science? Grin :-) >As far as I'm concerned, it all went wrong when computer rooms became >warehouses. That's a very reasonable viewpoint. I might disagree that it's the sole place where things went wrong, but I won't disagree that it is one of them. Regards, Nick Maclaren.
From: Gavin Scott on 2 Feb 2010 16:56 Eugene wrote: > I drive by Gordon's condo every so often, and his offices are next door > to where Avatar is playing in 3-D Imax. I last same him at an IBM > Almaden event in July where we chatted about where the Museum is headed > (he's not happy either). I haven't been over to the museum in ages, but I was really sad to see visible storage close. That was perhaps the best museum experience ever, having all those famous machines right *there*. All of the designs for the $50,000,000 version that I saw looked like a big walk-through coffee-table book. Lots of pretty colors to engage the visual cortex while your feet get sore, and lots of text that people will gloss over. It's going to be hard to beat the warehouse + enthusiastic docent model I think. More on topic, I spent a recent weekend playing with F# motivated by the fact that I've never done much with functional programming and that with Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft is promoting F# to a first class language with support on par with C# and Visual Basic. This may well make it the most widely used functional programming language before very long. F# comes from ML by way of [O]Caml, and is moderately compatible with OCaml with additional features for imperative and OO coding styles to be fully compatible with the rest of the .Net world. I found it an interesting language, and can definitely see a lot of advantages in trying to extract parallelism out of something like this rather than with the usual C-derived stuff. I'm curious how many of the "C problems" go away with functional styles of problem description, or whether the hard ones just mutate into a different form. G.
From: Eugene Miya on 2 Feb 2010 17:20
In article <hk8oks$afs$1(a)smaug.linux.pwf.cam.ac.uk>, <nmm1(a)cam.ac.uk> wrote: >In article <4b6780bb$1(a)darkstar>, Eugene Miya <eugene(a)cse.ucsc.edu> wrote: >>Robert Myers <rbmyersusa(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> My desktop will run circles around the >>>supercomputers I used to use and that I still think of as the genuine >>>article.) >> >>That's because of the past tense. That little 'd' at the end of "use." >>You could go back.... > >Each of my hearing aids is tens of thousands of times more powerful >than the first supercomputer I used :-) What computer was that? I just got an email marvelling how much "power" is in my particular (or any) smart phone. The software is still somewhat broken. But out of time context comparisons are only amusing for history sake. Don't get me wrong, I highly appreciate my phone's numeric computation capabilities, web browsing, realtime traffic displays on maps, etc. Sid Fernbach, for whom one of the IEEE awards is given, started a briefly class classification of supercomputers, and outsiders wondered what they VAX, the mainframe, their IBM PC rated on his scale where a Cray 1 was a "Class 6" machine. Since I had Sid handy, I had a chance to ask him: Oh, they are "class 1/2". They barely even rate. They aren't supercomputers. Other friends (in and out of computing) call computers the drug equivalent of pot/marijuana. When considering hearing aid or phones, I am reminded of the story of the acoustic kitty. And the auditory reasons for the project which tell me to this day why hearing aids (and phones) have their limits. The behind the scenes punchline not heard in public is "What makes you think we stopped there?" -- Looking for an H-912 (container). |