Re: [Caml-list] thousands of CPU cores

[Oliver Bandel <oliver@first.in-berlin.de>]

Zitat von Peng Zang <peng.zang@gmail.com>:

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> On Thursday 10 July 2008 11:01:31 pm Brian Hurt wrote:
> > On Thu, 10 Jul 2008, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
> > > I wouldn't take this article too seriously. It's just
> speculation.
> >
> > I would take the article seriously.
> >
> > > Just open up your mind to this perspective: It's a big risk for
> the CPU
> > > vendors to haven taken the direction to multi-core.
> >
> > *Precisely*.  It also stands in stark contrast to the last 50 or so
> years
> > of CPU development, which focused around making single-threaded
> code
> > faster.  And, I note, it's not just one CPU manufacturer who has
> done this
> > (which could be chalked up to stupid management or stupid
> engineers)- but
> > *every* CPU manufacturer.  And what do they get out of it, other
> than
> > ticked off software developers grumbling about having to switch to
> > multithreaded code?
>
> I think we can all agree that more computing units being used in
> parallel is
> going to be the future.  The main point here is that a shared-memory
> architecture is not necessarily (and in my opinion doubtful) the
> approach
> that will be taken for large numbers of CPUs.
[...]

For example, if you have a non-profit research project,
you can use the BOINC infrastructure, which provides
about 580000 PCs to help you :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing

There is no Shared-Mem as we know it from our local PCs, there
is distributed calculation around the whole planet.

Threads will not help there ;-)

Ciao,
   Oliver