At 11:09 AM 12/9/98, Eliot & Linda wrote:
>I'm very impressed by the low-cost supercomputer-class clusters that
>Laurence Livermore are building, i.e. Beowolf with Intel PCs and Avalon
>with Digital AXP machines.  

A local company, Symbolic Sound, has the world's fastest music
synthesis system that gives you complete control over your waveforms.
It is implemented in Smalltalk.  Well, it actually consists of a
set of DSPs that are controlled by a Smalltalk program.  You use
the Smalltalk program to compose your music (i.e. to build up
Sound objects) and when you plan the music, the program generates
code for the DSPs (i.e. compiles the Sound objects to DSP code)
and then plays the music on the DSPs.  The whole process takes a
fraction of a second.

If I wanted to do very heavy duty computation on an array of machines,
I'd build high-level control in Smalltalk, and have Smalltalk generate
code for the machines.  This might be a good solution for all kinds of
problems.

-Ralph