<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">I completely agree with this. Before I retired from Cray last summer I was primarily investigating alternative computational paradigms for both massively multi-threaded and multi-core architectures. A couple of years ago, as Cray's representative, I attended a small NSF-sponsored conference of about 6 industry and 6 university representatives to discuss what sorts of research should be done to be ready for the multi-core architectures that we are beginning to see now. Microsoft's representative (Burton Smith, who was previously the architect of Cray's multi-threaded supercomputers) called this the preeminent current challenge for the software industry.<div><br></div><div>Subsequently I identified a number of potential applications and computational approaches that are (or could be made to be) consistent with massively multi-threaded and/or multi-core architectures. These approaches included graph algorithms, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, memory-resident databases, and several others. Most of these would require quite a bit of software infrastructure development before they would be easy to use. These research/development suggestions got an enthusiastic reception from the technical community within Cray, but they couldn't stand up to a business-case analysis. There is a chicken-and-egg problem for Cray (and presumably for most vendors other than Intel and Microsoft) in that they can't afford to invest in this until there is sufficient demand; and there won't be much demand until users have a chance to try out and discover good uses for the new paradigms. I toyed with the idea of trying to promote a CCL port to Cray's multi-threaded architecture, but initial discussion with other senior management convinced me that it would never fly for lack of current demand. I briefly had visions of having access to the world's largest and fastest lisp machine; oh well ...</div><div><br></div><div>NSF and DARPA will undoubtedly fund research in this area and they are known to take some chances on new ideas. But given how I saw them being pulled by influential industry and university factions, I expect that much of the funding will be used for small extensions to current paradigms rather than doing anything too radical. I hope I'm wrong about that.</div><div><br></div><div>So the hope that I still have is that people such as those who subscribe to this newsgroup will continue to push the boundaries on their own; that CCL will turn into a really good multi-core tool to facilitate such research, and that eventually others will see the value too. Good luck to you all!</div><div><br></div><div>Paul</div><div><br><div><div>On May 19, 2009, at 7:05 AM, Alexander Repenning wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>not so fast ;-)</div><div><br></div><div>The "how can we make use of multiple cores" is currently on the the hottest funding topics supported by NSF, DOE, Microsoft, .....</div><div><br></div><div>Perhaps it is the Lisp way to look at architectures such as the x86 and see mostly limitations when indeed there are plenty of opportunities. This is not about registers but about enabling end user programmers such as scientists to make use of parallelism. The big question is how to reconceptualize programming. One of the main problems is the need to overcome bad algorithmic assumptions especially the use of unnecessary loops. For instance, in Bioinformatics textbooks are full of loop based implementations of algorithms dealing with huge data structures such as gene sequences. In many cases one could replace sequential loops with parallel execution.</div><div><br></div><div>Zoom out of the low level view of things. What could multi core Lisp do? Look at the computational challenges that users are dealing with. Try to come up with new computational paradigms that could help. Lisp could be a great platform to explore these issues. Careful: if you can contribute to this you may actually receive funding.</div><div><br></div><div>alex</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><div><div>On May 18, 2009, at 10:45 AM, Brian Mastenbrook wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); ">On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 10:13 -0400, Glen Foy wrote:<br><br><blockquote type="cite">My ignorance of compiler design is breathtaking, but could multi-core<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">compiler techniques be used to compensate for Intel's register-starved<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">architecture?<br></blockquote><br>In a word, no.</span></blockquote></div><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Prof. Alexander Repenning</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">University of Colorado</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Computer Science Department</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Boulder, CO 80309-430</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">vCard: <a href="http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf">http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf</a></font></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span></span></span></div></span> </div><br></div>_______________________________________________<br>Openmcl-devel mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Openmcl-devel@clozure.com">Openmcl-devel@clozure.com</a><br>http://clozure.com/mailman/listinfo/openmcl-devel<br></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>