[GTALUG] a niggle about parallel

David Collier-Brown davec-b at rogers.com
Tue Jan 30 17:58:36 EST 2018


On 30/01/18 05:06 PM, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 30, 2018 at 03:49:54PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
>> The Sun T series looked very interesting to me when it came out.  It
>> looked to me as if the market didn't take note.  Perhaps too many had
>> already written Sun off -- at least to the extent of using their
>> hardware for new purposes.  Also Sun's cost structure for marketing
>> and sales was probably a big drag.
> Most developers were totally unprepared for parallel computing at
> the time.  So most people couldn't write software to take advantage of
> the chips.

That was true of the non-Sun experimental architectures, like the Intel 
432 and various VLIW machines. The Sun T machines ran ordinary SPARC 
code without any changes or recompiling.

It very definitely wasn't for applications that already parallelized. 
Our customers didn't have such things! Hadoop was almost unknown to them 
then.

I suspect Sun had already fallen off too many people's radar, and the 
performance improvement didn't change anyone's  minds.

--dave


-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain



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