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Gene Amdahl has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#31

Post by chandsie »

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.

A current undergrad and TA for CS courses at Cal (UC Berkeley) checking in here. The course I TA for, CS 61C Machine Structures (inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/) introduces the concept in our unit on parallelism. This is a required course for all undergraduate CS majors and is the third course in the introductory series.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#32

Post by frozenport »

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 have a dissenting opinion: Amdahl's law is obvious and therefore it doesn't need to be explicitly taught.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#33

Post by zerohp »

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.

It comes up repeatedly in Computer Science and Computer Engineering coursework at University of Illinois. Assembly, C and C++ are unavoidable in both programs.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#34

Post by ragnarok451 »

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.

It definitely came up in CMU's 15-418 Parallel Architecture class.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#35

Post by privong »

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'm not a CS/Eng person, rather an astrophysicist who spends a reasonable amount of my time working on simulations. Amdahl's law has been mentioned during lectures at week-long schools on numerical methods.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#36

Post by detaro »

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.

Yes, in Operating Systems and in a parallel programming course. And on a few other occasions it was described informally, don't remember if the name actually was mentioned then.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#37

Post by jdale27 »

redroo wrote: post #5

The purpose of Amdahl's 1967 paper was to dissuade customers that multiprocessors were cost-effective (read: more expensive for him to produce at Amdahl Corp). In a certain sense, he was correct. Ironically, however, that same paper is now the most quoted in the parallel processing literature. Moreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a marketing coup.

Moreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a marketing coup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy strikes again.

Re: Gene Amdahl has died

#39

Post by nhaehnle »

jdale27 wrote: post #37
redroo wrote: post #5

The purpose of Amdahl's 1967 paper was to dissuade customers that multiprocessors were cost-effective (read: more expensive for him to produce at Amdahl Corp). In a certain sense, he was correct. Ironically, however, that same paper is now the most quoted in the parallel processing literature. Moreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a marketing coup.

Moreover, he never wrote down the "law" that is now attributed to him---a marketing coup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy strikes again.

Stigler's law - that is, the fact that eponyms often deny credit for an invention to many people who were relevant for it - is one of the reasons why I try to avoid eponymy where possible.

The other reason is that eponymy is often a symptom of laziness. Rather than finding a good, descriptive name for something, you end up with an eponym that is not at all evocative of the meaning behind it. For example, and without putting too much thought into it, Amdahl's law could have been called something like law of scaling or law of bottlenecks.

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