[Alex Martelli] > ... > As CPUs and floating-point units became fast enough, more and more of > the speed issues with so-called "CPU intensive" bottlenecks in > mechanical-engineering CAD actually became related to memory-access > patterns (a phenomenon I had already observed when I worked on IBM > multi-CPU mainframes with vector-units, being sold as "supercomputers" > but in fact still having complex and deep memory hierarchies -- Cray guys > of the time such as Tim no doubt had it easier!-). Indeed, Seymour Cray used to say a supercomputer is a machine that transforms a CPU-bound program into an I/0-bound program, and didn't want anything "in between" complicating that view. As a result, optimizing programs to run on Crays was, while still arbitrarily difficult, generally a monotonic process, rarely beset by "mysterious regressions" along the way. Now that gigabyte+ RAM boxes are becoming common, I wonder when someone will figure out that the VM machinery is just slowing them down <0.9 wink>.
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