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HPC is dying, and MPI is killing it

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Re: HPC is dying, and MPI is killing it

#121

Post by dalke »

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #119
twic wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't new, though. C++ had that. Eiffel had that. Every programming language that isn't Smalltalk has that.

I'm not dead certain but I think smalltalk may have come before C++. For sure it was in widespread use before C++ was in widespread use.

Smalltalk started in '71 and was used for research purposes in '72. Smalltalk '80 was the definitive version for most. This means that Smalltalk slightly predates C. By comparison, C++ didn't start until 1983.

You wrote "your ability to write Java source in any text editor at all was, all by itself, a new method of doing Object-Oriented Programming".

Simula, considered the first OO language, is text based in the same way that Java is, and not image based like Smalltalk. Since Smalltalk is inspired by Simula, I do not believe one can say using any text editor is a new method of doing OO programming.

Re: HPC is dying, and MPI is killing it

#122

Post by MichaelCrawford »

wglb wrote: post #64
MichaelCrawford wrote: post #28

This happened with Smalltalk. I was a Smalltalk coder. I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. It has always been clear to me that Smalltalk is far superior to Java. I left the company after a little while, to do C++ graphics. I later heard that my former employer rewrote their Smalltalk application in Java. Now no one uses Smalltalk anymore. While Objective-C is based on Smalltalk, Smalltalk was far easi…

Ah, but I think that the comparison doesn't hold. In my opinion, Smalltalk was the right way to do all of what we do, and Java took the enterprise mindset by storm. There was an enormous project at a very large Insurance company near Chicago that was written in Smalltalk, but got abandoned for some obscure reason. I think that Smalltalk has the right level of abstraction and a lot of very good other things about it.…

"Java took the enterprise by storm"

Smalltalk's demise no doubt had a lot to do with Sun's marketing people convincing a bunch of Pointy-Haired Bosses that garbage collection means that you have no memory leaks, as well as that Java was the only way to do cross-platform development.

IMHO Java is one of the very worst ways to do cross-platform, however when I ported a a Mac OS Pascal program to Java so that it could be run on both Windows and Mac, the client was completely convinced that Java was the only way that could possibly be done - this despite my loud and frequent protests that the state of Java at the time was quite poor, that the Java interpreter was dog-slow, that Java sucked the memory dry, and that I knew a whole bunch of ways to write cross-platform native code that would be far faster and use far-less memory.

The reason that Smalltalk specifically suffered from this, is that Sun made most of its money by selling servers to the enterprise. Sun Workstations were favored by scientists and engineers, however Sun's real money came from enterprise servers.

Right around that time, Smalltalk was largely used for enterprise applications. Enterprise application developers loved Smalltalk absolutely to death however the bean counters and the PHBs were more inclined to listen to marketdroids promises about garbage collection being immune to memory leaks.

Garbage collection and memory leaks are orthogonal.

Re: HPC is dying, and MPI is killing it

#124

Post by wglb »

MichaelCrawford wrote: post #122
wglb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but I think that the comparison doesn't hold. In my opinion, Smalltalk was the right way to do all of what we do, and Java took the enterprise mindset by storm. There was an enormous project at a very large Insurance company near Chicago that was written in Smalltalk, but got abandoned for some obscure reason. I think that Smalltalk has the right level of abstraction and a lot of very good other things about it.…

"Java took the enterprise by storm" Smalltalk's demise no doubt had a lot to do with Sun's marketing people convincing a bunch of Pointy-Haired Bosses that garbage collection means that you have no memory leaks, as well as that Java was the only way to do cross-platform development. IMHO Java is one of the very worst ways to do cross-platform, however when I ported a a Mac OS Pascal program to Java so that it could b…

While I agree with your conclusion, the Smalltalk's demise no doubt had a lot to do with Sun's marketing people convincing doesn't match what I observed. I was at allstate at the time, and when the groundswell of attention paid by the rank and file was sufficiently overwhelming (in a positive way), that the PHBs had to say "chill. We need to investigate this" in true Gartner fashion. Later, it did get adapted, but there is a lot of .net there.

Re: HPC is dying, and MPI is killing it

#125

Post by siegela »

John: You make some solid points. Most though seem to more support the idea that more research investment/emphasis is badly needed for HPC programming models. From an application perspective, one sees such a dominant reliance on MPI+X primarily because typically the value proposition just isn't there yet for alternatives (at least in the areas where I work, where we have undertaken new developments recently and done fairly exhaustive evaluations of available options). Though the coding can be somewhat tedious and rigid, in the end these shortcomings have been outweighed by the typical practical considerations -- low risk, extremely portable, tight control over locality and thus performance, etc. It's obviously not all or nothing - as you say we could choose something even lower level and possibly get better performance, but when seen from the perspective of the near and mid-term application goals, it's hard to make a different choice unless explicitly tasked with doing so.
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