[Beowulf] A start in Parallel Programming?

[Peter St. John]

Joe Landman wrote:

"...if you buy into the notion that there may in fact be some fundamental
physical limits on Moore's law due to the nasty combination of
thermodynamics (stability of small structures with respect to temperature,
and resistance of same to defect formation), and  quantum mechanics ..."

Yeah I buy into that. I figure that there's a ceiling of so many Deliverable
FLOPS per Cubic Angstrom? And I wonder if something like Nonvolatile Memory
vs Processing Bits per Second are sortof a Heisenberg Dual; if you want a
bit carved in stone, so it will still be there when you look later, you
won't be able to process it as fast as someting transient. So you could
maximize the amount of FLOPS in a milliliter, or the amount of RAM, but not
both.

So maybe the ceiling will be (Deliverable FLOPS times Recoverable Bytes)/ml

I think acheiving zero degrees kelvin, watching time zero in a telescope,
and the ceiling for DP are all kinda the same thing, and we'll entertain
ourselves reducing temp below 0.001K (whatever) and watching t < 0.00001 sec
and so on, for decades. Maybe we got within a certain kind of ballpark of 0K
first, now we're getting to the ballpark of time 0 cosmologically, and maybe
in a few decades we'll get in the ballpark of Max DFLOPSRB/ML (tm).

Robert?
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