Pthhbbbt.

[Gary D. Duzan]

In Message <9304101305.17321@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> ,
   Michael David WINIKOFF <winikoff@mulga.cs.mu.oz.au> wrote:

=>Actually that's something I don't understand -- why are they no shared memory
 
=>multiple CPU workstations?
=>Sure, programming them may be a hassle if you do it in C.
=>If you use something like Parlog, Concurrent Prolog or a parallel implementat
ion
=>of a functional language then you can get good speed up for say 4 processors.

   I see two issues cost/benefit and parallel programming. There are
additional costs involved in designing a bus, memory, etc. to support
a parallel machine, not not mention the cost of the extra CPUs, and
taking advantage of the benefits generally requires rethinking and
reimplementing programs to use the available parallelism. The natural
decision given these issues would be to look into a faster single CPU
instead. If we ever get an optical computer design, this trend will
likely continue even further into the future. At some point, however,
I imagine that parallel processing will make it into the mainstream.
Also, there seems to be a serious lack of training in parallel
programming, so developing parallel software would likely be more
costly.
   I may be mistaken, but I believe Sun may actually be making a
2-CPU Sparcstation 10 desktop machine. Also, superpipelined and
superscalar CPU designs take advantage of some instruction-level
parallelism.

                                        Gary Duzan
                                        Time  Lord
                                    Third Regeneration
                         Humble Practitioner of the Computer Arts