Live data from Hacker News

AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

jeffgeerling.com

131–132 of 132 posts

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. What languages do you think are good ones for HPC? 2. Re GAs, Koza, and cost: In Koza's book on GAs, in one of the editions, he mentions that they scaled the performance of their research system by five orders of magnitude in a decade. What he didn't mention was that they did it by going from one Lisp Machine to 1000 PCs. They only got two orders of magnitude from per-unit performance; the rest came from growing t…

> 2. Re GAs, Koza, and cost: Ya that's a really good point about the linear scaling limits of genetic algorithms, so let me provide some context: Where I disagree with the chip industry is that I grew up on a Mac Plus with a 1979 Motorola 68000 processor with 68,000 transistors (not a typo) that ran at 8 MHz and could get real work done - as far as spreadsheets and desktop publishing - arguably more easily than today…

After sleeping on this, I realized that I forgot to connect why the aspects of good programming languages are important for parallel programming. It's because it's already so difficult, why would we spend unnecessary time working around friction in the language? If we have 1000 or 1 million times the performance, let the language be higher level so the compiler can worry about optimization. I-code can be simplified using math approaches like invariance and equivalence. Basically turning long sequences of instructions into a result and reusing that with memoization. That's how functional programming lazily evaluates code on demand. By treating the unknown result as unsolved and working up the tree algebraically, out of order even. Dependent steps can be farmed out to cores to wait until knowns are solved, then substitute those and solve further. So even non-embarrassingly parallel code can be parallelized in a divide and conquer strategy, limited by Amdahl's Law of course.

I'm concerned that this solver is not being researched enough before machine learning and AI arrive. We'll just gloss over it like we did by jumping from CPU to GPU without the HPC step between them.

At this point I've all but given up on real resources being dedicated to this. I'm basically living on another timeline that never happened, because I'm seeing countless obvious missed steps that nobody seems to be talking about. So it makes living with mediocre tools painful. I spend at least 90% of my time working around friction that doesn't need to be there. In a very real way, it negatively impacts my life, causing me to lose years writing code manually that would have been point and click back in the Microsoft Access and FileMaker days, that people don't even think about when they get real work done with spreadsheets.

TL;DR: I want a human-readable language like HyperTalk that's automagically fully optimized across potentially infinite cores, between where we are now with C-style languages and the AI-generated code that will come from robotic assistants like J.A.R.V.I.S.

Re: AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz

#132
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not understanding how the 10 GB of RAM gets assigned to a core. Is this just his way to describe memory channels corresponding to the cores?

It's not assigned at the hardware level (although Ampere has memory QoS) but you can assign RAM at the VM level which is what these CPUs are intended for.

Thank you.
Post reply on HN