Survival Guide for Artists, creative types, working in the new medium of multicore/manycore PC Systems.
By Art Scott, Semasiographologist.
Copyright © 2008, by Art Scott. All rights reserved.
Executive Summary
It was
soo hot on flat-land-world silicon . The inhabitants, called circuits, were using too much energy per unit of bit pushing work; there was a lot of friction. The circuits’ transistor minds were melting from heat stroke. They were going metastable, losing their minds! They didn’t know what state they were in, on or off.
Their clock was too fast, they had no time to decide anything, what was the Object?, their Function? They’d lost their Framework. They couldn’t live that way any longer, on a single core super fast
hot silicon world. So wisely the circuit inhabitants put their transistor minds together and decided to go
Green, use less energy per bit pushing unit, divide and
chill out.Thus single core sequential world ended (see them in a museum), and multi-/many-core world came to be, and it was good:
cooler,
greener, more capable; but there were new challenges: The Threads of their lives were incomprehensibly
waaay complicated. Now that there were more cores, 2, 4, 8, 42, 80 ... 1024, how were they to work and play together? They need a new language, the bearded and unbearded are hard at work on a
Coordination language.
Stay tuned for the next exciting episode: Sequential Programmers meet Multi-, Many- core world --- go wild, then enter 12 steps to parallel concurrent zen.
