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That "they didn't have any big cranes" forces the analogy in a way that breaks it. The solution wherever cranes are used is absolutely to get a bigger crane. An

That "they didn't have any big cranes" forces the analogy in a way that breaks it. The solution wherever cranes are used is absolutely to get a bigger crane. And also, oxen were absolutely bred to be bigger. That's kind of the defining thing that distinguishes draft oxen from other kinds of cattle. But that process was limited by some factors that are peculiar to domesticated animals. And, of course, if you need to solve the problem right now, you make do with the current state of the art in farm animal technology. Admiral Hopper's lecture wasn't delivered too long after 1976, which saw the release of both the CRAY-1 (single CPU) and the ILLIAC IV (parallel). ILLIAC IV, being more expensive, harder to use, and slower than the CRAY-1, was a promising hint at future possibility, but not particularly successful. Cray's quip on this subject was (paraphrasing) that he'd rather plow a field with one strong ox than $bignum chickens. Admiral Hopper was presumably responding to that. What they both seem to miss is that the best tool for the job depends on both the job and the available tools. And they both seem to be completely missing that, if you know what you're doing, scale up and scale out are complementary: first you scale up the individual nodes as much as is practical, and then you start to scale out once scale up loses steam.

hbosch 2y ago
Yeah, but trying to create a perfect analogy is like trying to improve the poundcake, just isn't worth it.
- dylan604 2y ago
  If you served me two pound cakes at the same time, I would say things were improved. However, it wouldn't be very efficient as I would still only eat them serially instead of in parallel
  - interroboink 2y ago
    Now I'm considering whether I'd rather have two pound cakes, or one big one... One normal-size, versus 10 miniature ones? Needs research (:
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Depending on how you look at it, 10 is just a second one.
  - Shadowmist 2y ago
    Is one hand for each cake hyper-threading?
kortilla 2y ago
>And also, oxen were absolutely bred to be bigger. That's kind of the defining thing that distinguishes draft oxen from other kinds of cattle. In your attempt to take down the analogy you just reinforced it. They quickly hit the limits of large oxen and had to scale up far faster than any selective breeding could help. The exact same thing happened in computing even during the absolute hay day of Moore’s law. Workloads would very quickly hit the ceiling of a single server and the way to unblock yourself was not to wait for next gen chips but to parallelize.
- crmd 2y ago
  The Sun E10k/15k was the last big ox in my tech career. I miss the big ox days.
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  It's not that multiprocessing systems didn't exist at the time Hopper delivered this lecture; it's that they remained fairly niche products for computing researchers and fairly deep-pocketed organizations. At the time, multiprocessing was still very difficult to pull off. It wasn't necessarily analogous to just yoking two oxen to the same cart. It was maybe more like a world where the time it takes to breed an ox that's twice as strong is comparable to the time it takes to develop a working yoke for state-of-the-art oxen, and also nobody's quite sure how to drive a two-oxen team because it's still such a new idea. So the parallel option wasn't as sure of a bet from a business perspective as it is now.
dumbo-octopus 2y ago
Interestingly, there are cases where a “support crane” is made to lift crane components up to a higher altitude where a different “primary crane” can be to do the remainder of the heavy lifting. At that point the listing can theoretically be efficiently parallelized, with two items being able to be hoisted at any given moment. This technique famously remodeled the iconic Tiffany building in NyC. https://www.mgmclaren.com/projects/crane-lift-at-tiffanys/ https://www.mgmclaren.com/projects/crane-lift-at-tiffanys/
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  How you describe this sounds more like pipelining.
tpmoney 2y ago
Her analogy is in the context of her larger topic of systems of computers, and I think history has largely proven out her advocated approach. She highlights a case of trying to cram a multi-user time sharing system, security system, database and actual programs all onto a single large computer, and contrasts this with having a separate system managing multiple user access, a separate system managing the database, and individual systems managing each application. Which sounds a lot like a firewall/gateway + Postgres server + API server + reporting server + etc + etc setup that is pretty much the design of every major system I've worked on. Yes, to a small degree, we sort of cram these things back into a single box these days by way of virtualization, but it's pretty rare to see a system where everything is running on the same machine, under the same OS like Admiral Hopper would have been talking about at the time.

hbosch 2y ago

Yeah, but trying to create a perfect analogy is like trying to improve the poundcake, just isn't worth it.

dylan604 2y ago
If you served me two pound cakes at the same time, I would say things were improved. However, it wouldn't be very efficient as I would still only eat them serially instead of in parallel
- interroboink 2y ago
  Now I'm considering whether I'd rather have two pound cakes, or one big one... One normal-size, versus 10 miniature ones? Needs research (:
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Depending on how you look at it, 10 is just a second one.
- Shadowmist 2y ago
  Is one hand for each cake hyper-threading?

kortilla 2y ago

>And also, oxen were absolutely bred to be bigger. That's kind of the defining thing that distinguishes draft oxen from other kinds of cattle. In your attempt to take down the analogy you just reinforced it. They quickly hit the limits of large oxen and had to scale up far faster than any selective breeding could help. The exact same thing happened in computing even during the absolute hay day of Moore’s law. Workloads would very quickly hit the ceiling of a single server and the way to unblock yourself was not to wait for next gen chips but to parallelize.

crmd 2y ago
The Sun E10k/15k was the last big ox in my tech career. I miss the big ox days.
bunderbunder 2y ago
It's not that multiprocessing systems didn't exist at the time Hopper delivered this lecture; it's that they remained fairly niche products for computing researchers and fairly deep-pocketed organizations. At the time, multiprocessing was still very difficult to pull off. It wasn't necessarily analogous to just yoking two oxen to the same cart. It was maybe more like a world where the time it takes to breed an ox that's twice as strong is comparable to the time it takes to develop a working yoke for state-of-the-art oxen, and also nobody's quite sure how to drive a two-oxen team because it's still such a new idea. So the parallel option wasn't as sure of a bet from a business perspective as it is now.

dumbo-octopus 2y ago

Interestingly, there are cases where a “support crane” is made to lift crane components up to a higher altitude where a different “primary crane” can be to do the remainder of the heavy lifting. At that point the listing can theoretically be efficiently parallelized, with two items being able to be hoisted at any given moment. This technique famously remodeled the iconic Tiffany building in NyC. https://www.mgmclaren.com/projects/crane-lift-at-tiffanys/ https://www.mgmclaren.com/projects/crane-lift-at-tiffanys/

pbhjpbhj 2y ago
How you describe this sounds more like pipelining.

tpmoney 2y ago

Her analogy is in the context of her larger topic of systems of computers, and I think history has largely proven out her advocated approach. She highlights a case of trying to cram a multi-user time sharing system, security system, database and actual programs all onto a single large computer, and contrasts this with having a separate system managing multiple user access, a separate system managing the database, and individual systems managing each application. Which sounds a lot like a firewall/gateway + Postgres server + API server + reporting server + etc + etc setup that is pretty much the design of every major system I've worked on. Yes, to a small degree, we sort of cram these things back into a single box these days by way of virtualization, but it's pretty rare to see a system where everything is running on the same machine, under the same OS like Admiral Hopper would have been talking about at the time.