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I read that the prefix scan is great so I read somebody's thesis. I a) didn't really get it and b) felt it was doing some complicated stuff for little value. Doubtless I'm wrong, computer scientists tend to be smarter than me, can you give me some insight why it's so valuable?
There are two really cool things going on here. Also, keep in mind NESL was published 1992 (and thus made in ~1990), which was not far from when the Connection Machine + Cray's got hyped and largely failed to mainstream parallel compute. 1. Data parallelism, esp. for super power efficient parallel hardware (SIMD, GPU, all the stuff that lets you go 10-100X over Spark for the same budget) is hard for computing over "i…
Thanks for a thorough answer!