A nice article about the underlying rules of peering and transit fees in the Internet autonomous systems (AS). If you ever wanted know why your HTTP request for the local newspaper home page travels through New York, here is the answer:
Archive for September, 2008
DRMAA Version 2 – Call for Action
September 5th, 2008 by PeterI recently announced the start of the specification work for DRMAA2.
Most interested people know that the DRMAA group is extremely conservative regarding major API changes. Of course, this is one of the reasons for the broad adoption of the spec. The upcoming months are therefore one of the few chances to trigger major changes in the API layout. Challenge us with JSDL, SAGA, OGSA-BES or anything else – we are quite open for ideas. Contact details are described on drmaa.org.
Parallel programming: Doomsayers and simplifiers
September 5th, 2008 by PeterMichael Wolfe summarizes in his article the heated debate about how to do multi-core / SMP programming in the right way. Great article, and completely agreed from the researchers point of view, even though I find his conclusion not really helpful.
The sad truth is there are not so many useful general (parallel) algorithms for the big mass of applications. To be honest, how many programs on your machine multiply matrices ? The big history of parallel processing in computer science helps in understanding the challenges, but not in finding the solution for a typical real-world application. From my perspective, we have to teach the students the balance between auto-magically solved problems (loop parallelization, scalable concurrent programming constructs) and things that will be always part of the application design, like the reasonable definition of task parallelism granularity. Sounds like exercises, exercises, exercises …