[squeak-dev] Prepare for Thousands of Cores --- oh my Chip - it's full of cores!

K. K. Subramaniam subbukk at gmail.com
Sun Jul 6 17:34:27 UTC 2008


On Sunday 06 Jul 2008 9:14:13 pm Rob Rothwell wrote:
> Do you think it is intentional, or merely a sad commentary on the general
> state of our current scientific infrastructure?  I do process improvement
> (Six Sigma) work at a hospital, which *assumes* an underlying foundation
> of, say, deductive and inductive reasoning, logic, math, science, even
> philosophy to some extent.  I think industry isn't so different from
> medicine, where vast specialization has pushed the generalist to the side
> so that not too many people see "the big picture" anymore.
It is not a generalist vs. specialist issue. Would we have posed such 
questions about Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci or Newton? The real issue is 
the reluctance to continue with a thread of investigation from the past. I 
believe the trend since the 80s to treat knowledge as "intellectual property" 
and monetize it pushes people to work in isolation and define themselves 
as "specialists". Reviving decades old research work does not look as good as 
initiating "new" development of multiprogramming toolkits during quarterly 
appraisals.

Expect a flood of new terms around parallel computing over the next couple of 
years. As Aussies would put it - prepare to be blinded with science :-).

Subbu



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