cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) (03/28/88)
On most vector machines, a vector is a rigid object. There are very many situations in which this gives bad performance. On a few, there is vector hardware which permits the direct use of sparse vectors. The other flexible vector operations needed are collapse and merge of vectors--this is needed to get efficient evaluation of functions where different algorithms are needed for different parts of the domain. The problem is even worse on parallel processors. I suggest that some of these non-rigid vector manipulations be added to vector and parallel processors, even if it requires adding special hardware for those purposes. -- Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907 Phone: (317)494-6054 hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (ARPA or UUCP) or hrubin@purccvm.bitnet