Sharing in D

[Koroskin Denis]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:15:03 +0400, Helmut Leitner  
<leitner at wikiservice.at> wrote:

> Walter Bright wrote:
>> downs wrote:
>>
>>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>>
>>>> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I would hazard to guess that adopting this would cause a larger
>>>>> rift than const.
>>>
>>> He's probably right.
>>   A couple years ago, I was in a room with 30 of the top C++  
>> programmers in the country. The topic was a 2 day conference on how to  
>> support multithreading in C++. It soon became clear that only two  
>> people in the room understood the issues (and I wasn't one of them).
>>  I think I understand the issues now, but it has taken a long time and  
>> repeatedly reading the papers about it. It is not simple, and it's  
>> about as intuitive as quantum mechanics.
>>  I suggested to Andrei and Bartosz just the other day that I don't  
>> expect the value in this model will be readily apparent. I'm pretty  
>> sure it won't be, as the issues are hard to understand. But the issues  
>> being hard to understand is exactly why this model is needed. There are  
>> surely several articles, papers, and tutorials in this :-)
>
> Perhaps this has already been discussed, but there seems another
> upcoming arms race between probably
>    - NVIDIA/CUDA, currently available 200+ cores available at $500
>    - Intel multicore, probably available in 12+ months
> competing in
>    - scientific number-crunching
>    - life video encoding (hot topic)
>
> I think it would be a BIG marketing effect for D, if it could support
> the NVIDIA/CUDA system. Probably it would even get payed by NVIDIA.
>
> Helmut

Other system to take into an account is Playstation 3. It has 7 cores, it  
runs Linux (YellowDog/Ubuntu/Gentoo...), it is cheap, it is available to  
everyone.
The PS3's hardware has also been used to build supercomputers for  
high-performance computing. IIRC, it used to have the best cost/GFLOPS  
ratio some time ago. PS3 uses a GCC compiler which is freely available (I  
love GPL for that reason) so a GDC is a matter of time (and some effort).  
BTW, gdc is already ported to Playstation Portable.

As a result, we could use a PS3 as a basis for an upcoming cuncurrent  
programming support in D.
I just don't see any other *real* possibilities to get 4 or more cores for  
a low price.