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No, MIMD is not dead, for example, see the Rex Neo or the Adapteva Epiphany, two of my favorite processors. However, when you say that something works well on "
by deepnotderp 9y ago
No, MIMD is not dead, for example, see the Rex Neo or the Adapteva Epiphany, two of my favorite processors. However, when you say that something works well on "massively parallel processors", you have an obligation to specify that you mean MIMD processors and/or graph processors, and SPECIFICALLY NOT A GPU.
Because the programming principles espoused in this article are antithetical to what you should do on a GPU, which is definitely the de facto "massively parallel processor" that would first come to people's mind.
- convolvatron 9y agook, so we're just arguing about terminology and expectation. maybe that reenforces Feo's point. it is worth noting that the El Dorado started out as a general purpose computer, then a general purpose scientific computer, and then later as a "graph processor" in an XT frame because the MTA on its own was market-dead. and that Feo has been a big supporter since at least stage 2. maybe is exactly this 'parallelism means GPU' which he's trying to argue against. I agree the overall arch of that point didn't really follow through in his talk, or someone's summary of that talk. 'mpp' was certainly a label adopted by TMC's cms 1-2, which were pretty damn simd. its was also used by the cray T3e, which was markedly not. the mta had 128 threads per cpu. a large enough instantiation could have had a few thousand hardware threads. later unbuilt designs backed the thread state in dram and could have gotten pretty damn fat. arguably 'massive' should be squishily about concurrency width.