PS3-XBOX 360 as Linux Graphics workstations

[Peter]

On Mon, 24 Oct 2005, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

>> What would be very cool would be to generate libraries or such that
>> can automate the offloading of computational effort.
>
> If you could come up with a generic automated way to make programs
> multithreaded, you would probably become very rich.

PI calculus is said to be a formal model for representing such programs. 
It can be very hairy, and I know very little about it, but I know that 
f.ex. MUD role-playing games can be split across several CPUs relatively 
easily because each player/node only sees a small part of the world at 
any one time, and because the tasks to be done at each cpu are clearly 
defined beforehead.

I have some experience with remotely synchronized state machines 
(hardware and software) and I can say that it gets hairy very fast. The 
telecom industry has a lot of experience with such networks and I think 
that they have funded a large part of the research for parallel 
computing efforts. The other large contributor was transputer research.

The act of parsing a program for possibly parallel tasks and splitting 
them across available nodes for execution is very much like printed 
circuit layout algorythms (like a travelling salesman algorythm but with 
more interesting constraints and in N dimensions). The act of parsing 
such a program can be harder than actually running it afterwards, and 
proving that the split/spread is optimal is even worse.

Peter
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