http://www.osnews.com/story/832/Interview_with_Addison_Snell_of_SGI Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2012, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:46:06 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? "It is also important to consider that the developers we are
investing in include, hobbyists, educational institutions, small ISVs, and other companies."

Great artical, I have loved SGI for a long time. However what bugs me is this. Everone knows that getting college kids hooked on products transated to future bizness, as he mentioned in the artical. But as i recal last time SGI came to my school they didn't bother to even come to the CS dept. (just went over the the math dept) and for that matter didn't even let students in the trailer. (however i got around that and got to play)

Our school has (i should say had) lots of Indy boxes, and my first few years thats where i spent most of my time (i could write a artical on all the security holes in irix )

And with the uprize of powerful multi platform based unix's (read fBSD & x86) uni's like mine nolonger see the value in buying these types of computers. The last time I sat at a SGI box was when a friend (SGI employee) brought his brand new (befor release) O2 back to school to work on his PHD. And a year ago when i walked though the CS labs i found that the old SGI lab is now beeing used as a store room (with the now unusabel indys still in there)

I know SGI doesn't care about this 1% or its total sales. And they don't care that people like me get mad at them for it. But if they are gona bring it up in a artical they should at least know how pissed some of us are about there lack of 'friendlyness' to CS majors.


Ok ok .. maybe this is just my school, i know we are cheep but hey.
anyway i would still give a body part to have one sitting on my desk, although after uing the BeAPI for so long going back to writeing motif code sounds like shooting myself in the head Mon, 25 Mar 2002 08:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? The pressure in most colleges is to use general-purpose computers
throughout, which means Windows machines.

It makes purchasing easier, support is needed only for one OS, and
class rooms can be used for teaching any subject.

There is usually a big fight needed even to get a room full of Macs
for the Design department. The money people can't see why anyone would
want to use some weird kind of computer when a standard PC is cheap
and does everything (they think).

Some of them find it hard to understand why you might need any extra
software other than Office. Mon, 25 Mar 2002 09:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? At the school I went to its almost the same with windows machines. 9 out of the 10 student computer labs are macs and the one that ran windows has been half converted to linux. Basically my school did the backward ass play to the minority thing (common there, they have as much vegan and vegitarian food as "regular" food in the res dinning halls). Mon, 25 Mar 2002 11:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? Well, luckly the CS dept just put in a new PC lab with fBSD on them. Which is the first real time students had access to a fbsd lab (first time is when i took over a old room next to my office and converted a bunch of 486's)

However the big tragity is in the education of new students. Its gone way down hill. When I took my parallel programing class we used parallaxis and MPI (and did true multi proc parallel programing) We also did a small game of life in java.

Now days from what i have heard they don't do anything but Java Threads. And they realy don't do a good job at that.

Also we used to have this great program for digital design. (forget the name but it did everthing) I remeber sitting in the SGI lab for hours designing our CPU's for class .. now days they dont do any of that. I dont think they design anything at all .. its more of just a lectur class now How sad.

Most students have no idea what those light blue boxes are shoved in the corner. And almost of them have never used a unix befor ... truely a sad situation. Mon, 25 Mar 2002 15:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I don't know if I buy that parallel processing with threads is any less pure than parellel processing with MPI. For doing Beowulf clusters and things of this sort, MPI is a must for cross-node communication. This is of course because even the most robust PC will only have eight processors. More likely, they will have one or two. Furthermore, cross-node communicatinon suffers on PC's due to memory latency and bandwidth problems. The programmer will therefore have to do explicit memory transfer operations very quickly.

On high end supercomputers, the system memory architecture allows for much more scaling in the number of processors. This means that the programmer can stay in the world of multi-threading, and leave the processing distrubition to the operating system. Eventually, even these systems will need explicit message passing, but that limit is at a much higher level.

Furthermore, the problem with moving one's thinking from serial to parellal processing is the same whether it is being done from threads or using MPI. Fragmenting the problem into parallel tasks and then worrying about data synchronization between those tasks will be very similar between the two. The one thing that will be lost by not ever studying explicit message passing, is efficient coding of cross node memory passing. Since the OS is making the entire system look like one memory block for multi-threaded parallel processing, there may not be any explicit memory transfers between nodes. However this type of scenario can still come up in the world of multi-threaded parallel processing, if data local to the thread object needs to be passed into another thread object.

That's not to say that your department hasn't gone downhill. I'm just stating that your blanket statement on parallel processing may not be true. Mon, 25 Mar 2002 18:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? I agree, they still use the same basic concepts of CS useing both Threads and multi Node processing. However my point was not the tech aspect of it .. i was comenting more on the 'required learning' involved in useing Java Threads over writing more complex code. Java seems to be more padded is good for teaching 100 level students about OO.. but for doing parallel we should provide 'real' systems to use. Students can uses Java on there PC at home, they will never get access to a 15node cluster to just write some programs on. This in a invaluable tool. Plus if you can do it the hard way (multi node) then you can also do it the easy way (java). In most cases


As for "anonymous" ....

Well, my spelling is bad .. well its actually worse than that ..some of it comes from my lazyness and some of it comes from the basic fact that i got my B and D all mix up at a young age (maybe dislecsic Tue, 26 Mar 2002 02:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? If you were using MacOS X, you'd have spell checking right in your web forms - actually you'd have it in any text box, at any time.

Ahh I love MacOS's Services.... Tue, 26 Mar 2002 03:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? > If it bugs you that much, sorry.

Yikes. Sorry there ynop. I didn't mean to be rude. I was just trying to do a little sparring but I blew it. Judging by your impressive list of apps on bebits

BTetris
BugOut
Cycler
DontGuessPy
Fetch
ImageShow
ImageSplitter
Index
Mahjongg
MNG Translator
NewsAdmin
News_daemon
OpenTracker.*
Picky
PortSpy
QNI
Scooter!
SplitPane
SuperSpots
theScreenSaver
Tile
Titles
YLanguageClass
YTabView

I'd, of course, be grateful to read your source code comments any day of the week! Tue, 26 Mar 2002 18:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread? http://www.osnews.com/thread? test Sun, 31 Mar 2002 05:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments