CASTalk.com

Joe Seigh wrote:

So these processor manufacturers all have these
nice new multi-core cpu's but apart from market
hyperbole (these cpu's will save the environment, etc...)
I don't see them actually doing anything to exploit their
potential. By "them", I mean them not us. We of course
know to do. But what's going on to get all the applications
to start exploiting this? The magic parallelization fairy?


Perhaps the magic paralization fairy... ;-)

On Fri, 25 Nov 2005 17:10:06 +0000, Stephen Fuld wrote:
I don't think so. Desktop searching is probably either totally disk
bound
or "embarassingly parallel" such that no big advance in programming
technology or expertise would be required.

Why would you expect that the bulk of applications with non-trivial
completion times (i.e., that make you wait, and consequently desire better
throughput) will all turn out to be such: i/o bound or embarrasingly
parallel (or at least fairly trivially parallel, if not actually
embarrasing)?

Charles Richmond <richchas@comcast.net> wrote:


Joe Seigh wrote:


So these processor manufacturers all have these
nice new multi-core cpu's but apart from market
hyperbole (these cpu's will save the environment, etc...)
I don't see them actually doing anything to exploit their
potential. By "them", I mean them not us. We of course
know to do. But what's going on to get all the applications
to start exploiting this? The magic parallelization fairy?


Perhaps the magic paralization fairy... ;-)


FWIW "paralization" doesn't show up in the Dashboard dictionary widget
(Oxford American Dictionaries), but "parallelization" does.

I think he meant paralyzation. Probably the result of corporate execs

"Andrew Reilly" <andrew-newspost@areilly.bpc-users.org> wrote in message
news:pan.2005.11.27.08.01.26.37664@areilly.bpc-users.org...

On Fri, 25 Nov 2005 17:10:06 +0000, Stephen Fuld wrote:

I don't think so. Desktop searching is probably either totally disk
bound
or "embarassingly parallel" such that no big advance in programming
technology or expertise would be required.

Why would you expect that the bulk of applications with non-trivial
completion times (i.e., that make you wait, and consequently desire better
throughput) will all turn out to be such: i/o bound or embarrasingly
parallel (or at least fairly trivially parallel, if not actually
embarrasing)?


Well, first of all, I was responding to an earlier post that mentioned
desktop searching, not making a general statement. That said, except for
graphics manipulations (which, as I said earlier seems amenable to tailored
instructions (e.g. SSE, etc.) or to better use of the streaming architecture
of graphics processors), and games, which have far better than average
programmers to take advantage of multiple cores, SMT, etc., I cannot think
of a high use example of an application that meets your stated criteria.
I'm not saying that there aren't any, but if you can think of some, please
let us all know.

On Sun, 27 Nov 2005 16:57:12 +0000, Stephen Fuld wrote:
Well, first of all, I was responding to an earlier post that mentioned
desktop searching, not making a general statement.

Sure, but it was such a nice statement, I thought it worth using as a
launching board, to get back to the topic of the Subject.

That said, except for
graphics manipulations (which, as I said earlier seems amenable to
tailored
instructions (e.g. SSE, etc.) or to better use of the streaming
architecture
of graphics processors), and games, which have far better than average
programmers to take advantage of multiple cores, SMT, etc., I cannot
think
of a high use example of an application that meets your stated criteria.
I'm not saying that there aren't any, but if you can think of some,
please
let us all know.

Well, there aren't really many things on desktops that cause any
perceptable delay at all. Hence the Forest curve.

Of those that many people encounter, media manipulations of various sorts
and searching stand out, and both of those are observably both trivially
parallelizable and/or IO bound.

Joe Seigh has mentioned browsers, and by extension most GUIs. I suspect
that most perceived browser slowness is really IO limitation (network
latency), but it's true that most existing "WIMP" systems have fairly
strong single-threading constraints in their historical implementation and
design, if not of necessity. High-end "visualization" and CAD systems
show that parallelization is useful for other heavy graphics problems, so
we should expect similar results for video games.

In the more specialized world of software development, compilation is
mostly parallelizable (and "make" handles that without much end-user
effort) up to the point where it becomes I/O bound.

What do you do that induces "wait" that you think isn't I/O bound or
trivially parallelizable?

Well, first of all, I was responding to an earlier post that mentioned
desktop searching, not making a general statement.

That said, except for
graphics manipulations (which, as I said earlier seems amenable to tailored
instructions (e.g. SSE, etc.) or to better use of the streaming architecture
of graphics processors), and games, which have far better than average
programmers to take advantage of multiple cores, SMT, etc., I cannot think
of a high use example of an application that meets your stated criteria.
I'm not saying that there aren't any, but if you can think of some, please
let us all know.

The antivirus software works basically the same way the immune system of
our

This won't work if the malware authors had techniques to completely remove
any trace of pattern on their code, but so far, they haven't learned that.
And no, I won't give them hints here ;-).

Ken Hagan <K.Hagan@thermoteknix.co.uk> writes:

David Magda wrote:
Under Windows I'm sure Norton will chew up one of the cores. (I'm
only half-kidding.)

Lots of corporate customers have no choice but to run such filth, so
they will see an immediate benefit. (I'm not even half-kidding.)

Yes, including where I work. Didn't seem to stop the latest Sober
variants (nor did it prevent Sony's rootkit from being installed). :-/

Oh well.

All antivirus software, at least as the term is understood now, is a fraud
and /cannot/ work as advertised, even in principle. Trying to ferret out
bad code using static methods is equivalent to solving the Halting
Problem, something I'm sure Norton and the rest of that mob understands
but willfully ignores as long as the ignorant crowds are willing to pay
money for the software and endless stream of updates.

All antivirus software, at least as the term is understood now, is a fraud
and /cannot/ work as advertised, even in principle. Trying to ferret out
bad code using static methods is equivalent to solving the Halting
Problem,
something I'm sure Norton and the rest of that mob understands but....

"Chris Barts" <puonegf+hfrarg@tznvy.pbz> wrote in message
news:1133364930_6285@corp.com...

Trying to ferret out bad code using static methods is equivalent to
solving the Halting Problem, something I'm sure Norton and the rest of
that mob understands but....

You may be giving "Norton" and the
"mob" more credit than they deserve....

;-)

The antivirus software works basically the same way the immune system of
our body works: It uses rather simple patterns against known evil-doers.
The pattern generation process is even less automated than in our body;
but in principle, malware that wants to spread out could be detected
automatically (by observing traffic - normal communication involves a high
variety of messages, each sent to few recipients, while worms and spam
send basically the same message to loads of others).

This won't work if the malware authors had techniques to completely remove
any trace of pattern on their code, but so far, they haven't learned that.
And no, I won't give them hints here ;-).

All antivirus software, at least as the term is understood now, is a fraud
and /cannot/ work as advertised, even in principle. Trying to ferret out
bad code using static methods is equivalent to solving the Halting Problem,
something I'm sure Norton and the rest of that mob understands but
willfully ignores as long as the ignorant crowds are willing to pay money
for the software and endless stream of updates.

The real beauty of the AV business model is that as Microsoft patch up
their software (and fewer viruses get through to dumb users) it's the
AV vendors who get the credit (coz it must be due to that new "filter"
software running on our firewall, right?).

Charles Richmond <richchas@comcast.net> wrote:

Perhaps the magic paralization fairy... ;-)

FWIW "paralization" doesn't show up in the Dashboard dictionary widget
(Oxford American Dictionaries), but "parallelization" does.