pratt@cs.stanford.edu (Vaughan Pratt) (04/19/91)
Archive-name: theory/logic/boole/1991-04-18
Archive-directory: boole.stanford.edu:/pub/ [36.8.0.65]
Original-posting-by: pratt@cs.stanford.edu (Vaughan Pratt)
Original-subject: Re: New i860 parallel machine
Reposted-by: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN)
From: Steven Ericsson Zenith <zenith@ensmp.fr>
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 91 22:39:08 +0100
Subject: New i860 parallel machine
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
Building a parallel supercomputer today out of off the shelf
parts has got to be real easy (given the time and money).
That brings back memories. This was exactly our attitude at Stanford
about workstations in 1980. We spent 11/80 to 8/81 building the Sun
workstation out of off-the-shelf parts in our "garage", namely Margaret
Jacks Hall 428, then Andy Bechtolsheim's office, previously Forest
Baskett's, now mine. Sun the company was formed at the end of 2/82,
and the ink turned black in 6/82.
But use of off-the-shelf parts was only one of several key
ingredients. Another was Unix, of which C was an integral part. Sun
shipped off-the-shelf Unisoft Unix throughout 1982 prior to its
in-house Lyon-Shannon port of Berkeley Unix. The GT860 needs the
parallel supercomputer equivalent of Unix and C. This is not an
off-the-shelf item today.
But fixing this is more than just finding another Dennis Ritchie. The
biggest obstacle is that we don't even know what concurrency is.
People think they know now, but in hindsight in 2020 they will be able
to see that they really did not know in 1991.
In 1891 physicists had no inkling of what physics would look like in
1926. And the great majority had no inkling that they had no inkling.
In 1991 computer scientists are in exactly the same situation with
regard to concurrency. Understanding the nature of concurrency is a
problem as important yet unsolved today as understanding the nature of
matter was a century ago. (I predict that ideas will soon start to
flow from the former to the latter, which is still far from wrapped up,
but that's another story.)
Although both sides of the Atlantic are attacking this question, in my
view Europe is ahead of the US in this very important area. The
largest electronic cache of US-generated papers on European-style
concurrency resides on a disk in, by coincidence, the above-mentioned
Sun garage. Its contents are listed in pub/README available by
anonymous ftp from Boole.Stanford.EDU.
Vaughan Pratt
--
=========================== MODERATOR ==============================
Steve Stevenson {steve,fpst}@hubcap.clemson.edu
Department of Computer Science, comp.parallel
Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-1906 (803)656-5880.mabell
-- comp.archives file verification
boole.stanford.edu
total 2344
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 14478 Mar 11 17:28 README
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 19608 Oct 26 19:45 am4.dvi
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 32654 Oct 26 19:44 am4.tex
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 277388 Feb 19 02:38 casthes.dvi
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 210216 Mar 7 16:48 casthes.tex
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 49940 Jan 6 00:33 catl.dvi
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 37374 Jan 6 00:33 catl.tex
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 96976 Oct 30 19:01 cg.dvi
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 69520 Nov 24 02:40 cg.tex
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 88092 Apr 2 17:37 es.dvi
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 67847 Apr 2 17:36 es.tex
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 236130 Jan 18 08:04 gidi.ps
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 134456 Oct 27 04:05 ijpp.dvi
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 107247 Oct 27 04:04 ijpp.tex
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 120648 Oct 26 22:00 iowatr.dvi
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 85581 Oct 26 21:57 iowatr.tex
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 100232 Dec 8 05:06 jelia.dvi
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 75598 Dec 8 05:06 jelia.tex
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 56798 Apr 2 17:36 logic.bib
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 145644 Oct 27 06:09 man.dvi
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 125228 Nov 19 15:39 man.tex
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 53944 Oct 21 21:18 pp2.dvi
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 41782 Oct 21 21:18 pp2.tex
-rw-r--r-- 1 11 10 38030 Apr 6 15:31 structdir
found boole ok
boole.stanford.edu:/pub/