paul@theV.net wrote:
Yes, today we have two-processors on a core, and uni-processor speed bump is unlikely to overshadow the effort of parallelism like it did 20 years ago. But we are also beginning to see applications requiring thousands of machines to run. The so called grid computing maybe a just another buzzword, but the reality is that grand applications just won't scale on today's two-processor core, and explicit parallelism often requires a prior knowledge on how to split the program, which is hardly scalable except some simple cases.
Re: the grid buzzword Grid computing, as seen by organisations like the GGF and mainstream toolkits such as Globus, is not about parallelisation, but instead simply about access to shared resources. That is, they're interested in providing tools and standards for remote, shared access to software services, data and hardware (and providing useful features like security, authorisation, authentication, monitoring and reliability). Of course peer-to-peer compute systems are more about parallelisation, but they tend to be mostly commercial/proprietary rather than standardised at the moment. The Grid will be more like an enhanced version of the current web. But Haskell could get involved there too, especially if styles such as web programming with continuations prove useful in future generations of web services architectures. Amanda -- Amanda Clare http://users.aber.ac.uk/afc/ Dept. of Computer Science, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DB