David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architectures and Languages

Re:David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architect... by ericand on Monday September 17, 2018 @05:02PM (#18010059)

I'm a VC and I've seen lots of pitches lately for various tech related to new architectures, be it GPU, FPGA or RISC. I'd add cryptocurrency to list workloads with insatiable computing demands.

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Re:David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architect... by crb002 on Monday September 17, 2018 @05:37PM (#18010328)

Massive parallel prefix and reduction operations in RAM. Start with just the MPI standard reduction ops. 1000x faster than Von Neuman bottleneck.

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Re:David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architect... by crb002 on Monday September 17, 2018 @05:42PM (#18010371)

Then an ASIC for sparse matrix multiply. Valiant's reduction of CFG parsing. Massive speedup to parsing workflows, and boon to security by getting rid of hand rolled parsers.

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Re:David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architect... by snaky on Monday September 17, 2018 @05:54PM (#18010469)

> Massive parallel prefix and reduction operations in RAM

Sounds similar to Micron Automata Processor.

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Re:David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architect... by crb002 on Monday September 17, 2018 @09:03PM (#18011528)

Micron's processor in memory doesn't have near the same bandwidth as a processor in memory array geared to doing parallel prefix.

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Re:David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architect... by so_tired on Monday September 17, 2018 @06:29PM (#18010674)

Do u see more pitches for source-code level solutions ?

i.e. analyzing and modifying the huge legacy of existing code base ?

This is a very difficult area of course (both financially and technologically). But the pay off can be very large. Imagine a vmware-like transformation at the source code level.

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Re:David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architect... by austincummings on Monday September 17, 2018 @06:54PM (#18010822)

> Imagine a vmware-like transformation at the source code level.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I'm interested. Could you explain?

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Re:David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architect... by platform on Monday September 17, 2018 @09:19PM (#18011593)

Probably things similar to Automated Code transformations. Eg: http://www.semdesigns.com/Products/Services/LegacyMigration....

they site some numbers by Gartner (from '99, when 2K scare was on everyone's mind)

"...

Cost of doing a manual migration:The Gartner Group notes that the cost for manual code conversion can range from $6 - $26 per LOC and is accomplished at a rate of 160 LOC per day (Gartner Group study "Forecasting the Worldwide IT Services Industry: 1999,1").

An assumption is that the migration is going between two relatively similar languages (e.g., not trying to go from COBOL to full object-oriented Java). Using Gartner's numbers, a million lines of code costs $6-$26 million to migrate.

Time to do a manual migration: Again, using Gartner's numbers, a legacy system with a million lines of code requires some 28+ man-years of labor to convert. With a team of 10, this takes 3 elapsed years if done well. With larger systems, one has larger teams. Larger teams require more interactions, slowing them down further.

A 10 million line application simply doesn't have any practical manual migration due to time frames.

Never used their services.

But I do think this will continue to be difficult, yet beneficial option, for the migrations from legacy/less secure software.

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Re:David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architect... by mitchty on Monday September 17, 2018 @07:50PM (#18011140)

Sounds like as400 bytecode maybe?

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