Gene Amdahl has died • Hacker News Board

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#11

Post by krylon » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 4:36 AM UTC

Gene Amdahl was remarkable person, both as an engineer and an entrepeneur.

The Computer History Museum has a very interesting interview with Gene Amdahl as part of its Oral History Collection - http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702492 - that is, quite frankly, more interesting than anything I could come up with right now.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#12

Post by etrain » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 4:42 AM UTC

jmspring wrote: post #8

Honest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last 10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up? I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools. I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.

I published a paper this year that used it directly and even proposed a modification of it to model job time for a distributed execution environment with a centralized master governing scheduling, task serialization, etc.

When you talk scale-out of any large system, or manycore whatever, Amdahl's law is absolutely fundamental, and when you hear someone say "perfect horizontal scalability," Amdahl's law governs when that will no longer be true.

People who do theory on distributed algorithms use it even if they don't realize it.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#13

Post by tjohns » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 4:42 AM UTC

jmspring wrote: post #8

Honest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last 10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up? I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools. I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.

Amdahl's Law definitely came up in my undergrad CE/CS courses at USC. I'm not sure how you could teach a computer architecture or processor design class and not mention it.

And for what it's worth, we still covered C/C++ and assembly (MIPS + x86), in addition to Java.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#14

Post by circlecrimson » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 4:42 AM UTC

We really need to rid the world of Alzheimer as soon as possible. The bittersweet thing is that today's golden era titans of innovation may not live long enough for these anti-aging treatments to be deployed.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#15

Post by bricestacey » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 4:44 AM UTC

jmspring wrote: post #8

Honest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last 10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up? I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools. I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.

CS degree. Never heard of it. I graduated about 5 years ago.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#16

Post by yelnatz » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 4:44 AM UTC

jmspring wrote: post #8

Honest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last 10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up? I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools. I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.

I finished undergrad 2 years ago.

It never really came up until I took the Parallel Computing course late into my degree.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#17

Post by tomkinstinch » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 4:44 AM UTC

jmspring wrote: post #8

Honest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last 10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up? I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools. I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.

For me it did, yes. I first saw Amdahl's Law in a parallel computing course. Many of my professors were of the old guard though, and they made sure we learned the fundamentals. I'm grateful for it.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#18

Post by hchenji » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 4:44 AM UTC

jmspring wrote: post #8

Honest question for those who got received CS/Engineering degrees in the last 10 years, did Amdahl's Law come up? I've seen programming courses go away from assembler/c/c++ over the years to Java and then scripting languages at a couple local schools. I wonder if the history/theory side changed as well.

EE degrees yes definitely. I wish CS students learnt it too. Every fancy language du jour eventually has to generate machine code after all.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#19

Post by LandoCalrissian » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 4:50 AM UTC

“By sheer intellectual force, plus some argument and banging on the table, he maintained architectural consistency across six engineering teams,” said Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

This is one of the more impressive things to me. Keeping that many people on the same page is an amazing feat.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#20

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 4:57 AM UTC

When an IBM salesman saw a coffee cup with the Amdahl Logo at a customers site, he was instructed to cut one million dollar of his price offer. That was the one million dollar coffee mug.

http://dealwhisperers.blogspot.co.il/2015/07/a-million-dolla...

here is a picture of it http://www.deadprogrammer.com/fud-you