RE: Parallel Concurrency in Real-Time

[Tony Gore <Tony@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For the last couple of years I have been involved with the EC's HPCN-TTN
(Hogh Performance Computing and Networking - Technology Transfer Nodes)
program, aimed at getting what you think of as parallel programming into
small businesses across Europe.

Like it or not, "parallel processing" is perceived as synonymous with
difficult, expensive, elitist and not for your average business. They are
only interested in solving problems (check out some of the success stories
on www.hpcn-ttn.org - be patient if it is down at the moment - it has a
failing power supply and is 200km from here).

As an example - the engineers reported one project as disappointing - only a
2.5 times speedup from 4 processors. The customer is delighted as he is
saving $6M per year, from a cluster of 4 NT workstations. 

"Cost effective computing" to mean using several cheap processors instead of
one supercomputer is a more appealing way of describing things. In the EC's
Framework 5 program, HPCN has disappeared, but the logical inheritance is in
the action lines "Real Time Systems", "Networking", "Visualisation and
Simulation"

So I say "go with the flow" and retire "parallel processing" as a headline
term. It no longer is an attraction to anyone but a purist (and as you all
know, I am far from pure).

If you want to build up the community, agree a suitable term, whatever it
is, and then use it exactly, character for character, as a meta-tag in all
your web pages on this subject. Why? More and more search engines are
offering "find more articles like this" when you get the results and the
more a common phrase appears, the more likely it will turn these things up.

Tony Gore

Aspen Enterprises Limited
Aspen House, Burton Row, Brent Knoll, Somerset TA9 4BW.  UK
email  tony@xxxxxxxxxxxx (alternative if problems tony.gore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
tel +44-1278-761001  FAX +44-1278-760006  GSM +44-468-598570
URL: www.aspen.uk.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Oyvind Teig [mailto:Oyvind.Teig@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 22 October 1999 07:44
Cc: occam-com@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Parallel Concurrency in Real-Time


Folks,

  why don't we have a small revolution and include Concurrency
and Real-Time into our vocabulary?

Parallel was, is not so much, but is going to, I guess. 
Concurrency and Real-Time were, are, and will be.

The Parallel term has never been much in correspondance with
what I've been doing, even with 5 transputers, really.

Now is the time to include all 3 terms on our front web-page.

www.wotug.org! Great!

-- 

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