[Haskell-cafe] Haskell-Cafe Digest, Vol 158, Issue 29

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 31/10/16 5:44 AM, Rik Howard wrote:
> thanks for the reply.  Conceptually I like the idea of a single address
> space, it can then be a matter of configuration as to whether what
> you're addressing is another local process, processor or something more
> remote.

The world doesn't care what you or I happen to like.
I completely agree in *liking* a single address space.
But it's not true to what is *there*, and if you program for that
model, you're going to get terrible performance.

I've just been attending a 1-day introduction to our national HPC
system.  There are two clusters.  One has about 3,300 cores and
the other over 6,000.  One is POWER+AIX, the other Intel+Linux.
One has Xeon Phis (amongst other things), the other does not.
Hint: neither of them has a single address space, and while we
know about software distributed memory (indeed, one of the people
here has published innovative research in that area), it is *not*
like a single address space and is not notably easy to use.

It's possible to "tame" single address space.  When you start to
learn Ada, you *think* you're dealing with a single address space
language, until you learn about partitioning programs for
distributed execution.  For that matter, Occam has the same
property (which is one of the reasons why Occam didn't have
pointers, so that it would be *logically* a matter of indifference
whether two concurrent processors were on the same chip or not).

But even when communication is disguised as memory accessing,
it's still communication, it still *costs* like communication,
and if you want high performance, you had better *measure* it
as communication.

One of the presenters was working with a million lines of Fortran,
almost all of it written by other people.  How do we make that safe?