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Re: Articles about cool (prototype) technologies

#64
VERY nice find, Cornflakes! This really is clever.

One thing: as I was reading the story, it sounded like the distinction the author was drawing between "atomic tasks" and "shared data" is what I remember being called SISD and SIMD: Single-Instruction Stream Multiple Data Stream vs. Single Instruction Stream Single Data Stream (from "Flynn's Taxonomy").

As I recall it, atomic tasks are sequences of required and order-dependent instructions on their own data -- the basic von Neumann model. Those, as noted, are hard to parallelize. The fun starts when you can do something like one instruction against a large amount of similar data (SIMD); that can be parallelized as a graphics card handles big texture maps. (It's probably not an accident that an Nvidia employee was on the team that came up with Fractal.)

I wonder what Josh would make of this...? ;)

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