in reply to Re: Multi-core and the future
in thread Multi-core and the future

"Computer" used to be a job title. Quite a lot of effort went into parallelizing algorithms so they could be dispatched to a (large) room full of people (usually men) with desktop calculators who would each play CPU.

One of my college professors had a summer job as "computer" at Grumman. Reading Neville Shute's autobiography, Slide Rule, will give a flavor of that era. One of Mr Shute's titles was that of "Chief Calculator," and he was a noted aeronautical engineer.

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Re^3: Multi-core and the future
by DrHyde (Prior) on Sep 04, 2008 at 10:24 UTC
    There's also a wonderful book called "Weather prediction by numerical process" by Lewis Fry Richardson, published in, IIRC, the 1920s. In it he explains how to predict the weather using methods similar to what we use now, the significant difference being that instead of handing the data to a computer, he would hand it to a vast amphitheatre full of people, all of them trained to perform particular mathematical operations accurately, who would pass their results one to the other until all the data was crunched. His "computers" even had a clock signal just like ours - a conductor standing where they could all see him.
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      who would pass their results one to the other until all the data was crunched.

      It that bit that means you need threads rather than processes.

      (Or processes that do IPC through shared memory which has all the downsides plus more of threads.)

      Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
      "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
      In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.
[reply]

      Any one interested in "Weather prediction by numerical process" may find this interesting.

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