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Or was it my dog? Some days I relate to that locution, and I tie it somehow to Diogenes.
The internet consensus suggests the author is unknown. Unknown is a
very prolific author since the internet. Specially since Blogs, these
anonymous sources of wisdom, where anonymity is easy and attaining name
recognition is hard.
Or was it my dog? Some days I relate to that locution, and I tie it somehow to Diogenes.
The internet consensus suggests the author is unknown. Unknown is a
very prolific author since the internet. Specially since Blogs, these
anonymous sources of wisdom, where anonymity is easy and attaining name
recognition is hard.
There are no new ideas left, blogs are at best a new mold for old
ideas. Blogs may carry a novel mindset, or merely a new mass publishing
technique. A push-pull model of sorts for spam. The blogger mindset I
see could descend from Diogenes the cynic. Diogenes, self proclaimed
citizen of the world, presumably created the cosmopolitan concept. His
cynics placed reason above convention, and argued that if an act is not
shameful in private it should not be shameful in public. Strikingly
reminiscent of the blogger mindset, at least the blogging community at
Sun. Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's
feelings?, with that one I rest my case on Diogenes' blogging
paternity.
Unconvinced? OK, let's settle on a fictional ancestor, Blogenes, and
move on. The point is that neither the ideas nor the mindset are new.
The only novelty is in their expression. The blog expression starts
with our ability to capture, share, and interact electronically.
Capturing our thoughts wherever we are, even in the restrooms. And with
his record on private vs. public acts Blogenes would have taken his
laptop to the restrooms. Actually, who hasn't?
This new expression lets me write about old ideas, like convergence,
like the unstoppable force of general purpose volume technologies, and
of course, the smart use of concurrency to exploit the newfound
parallelism of CMTs. But why inflict old ideas onto others? Because,
remarkably, some old ideas are themselves finding new expressions in
new silicon.
For example, I have been blogging about CMT (Chip Multi Threading),
as the combination of multi-core processors with vertically threaded
cores. Neither is new, the advantages of evolving into multi-core
processors instead of faster processor clocks is undisputed by now.
Vertical threads go back at least a decade when architects I know like Laudon , Yamamoto, and Nemirovsky examined the virtues of hiding memory latencies through multiple hardware threads on the same processor pipeline.
By now all Sun's CMT processors incorporate four vertical threads
per core. Processor threads are hard to visualize, so here is a
picture. They are vertical, and when the rubber meets the road CMT
speed relies on four of them per processor core. In fact simultaneous
multi-threading has been tried in x86 architectures. It had only two wheels, wasn't that fast, and has already been abandoned.
Convergence is superficially the notion of unifying all networks
(voice, signaling, data, video) into an all IP network. For those of us
seeking the simple certainty of dogma, In the beginning God created the Packet.
And for the many whose only dogma is cost, convergence is all about
general purpose volume market costs. And that is fine, because as a
cynic placing reason above convention, convergence is not only about
unifying the networks but also unifying the processing building block
used to build them. Same processing element for voice, signaling, data,
and video, same for control and data planes.
Now, when picking a building block for a converged network, I
insist, infrastructure ain't built on laptop parts. Laptop processors
are made in volume allright, but they neglect the central tenet of the
converged network faith: The Packet. The new expression of a
converged building block is a General Purpose processor designed for
superior packet processing, and for now that means two things:
1) Vertical Threads
2) Native Network Interfaces
As simple as dogma.
I already touched on 10 Gigabit native network interfaces in my
previous post, so let's talk Vertical Threads. Vertical Threads, as
intended, hide cache miss latency, and packet practicioners know that
caches are evil to start with. There is no temporal locality in packet
arrivals other than in the short term burst. Things may work fine for a
small number of subscribers and collapse when the subscribers state no
longer fits in the processor cache. Vertical Threads also eliminate the
other packet nemesis: Interrupts. A multi-threaded processor with 32
threads like the UltraSPARC T1, or its 64 thread Niagara 2
successor, can dedicate a few threads to ingress packet processing
(dedicate as in "fully devote without interrupts") and deliver no sweat
wire speed packet processing in a general purpose processor.
Again, the converged building block is multi-threaded, not just multi-core. Multi
as in lots of threads, not as in more than one. Vendors that don't
have lots of threads complain that the software is not ready for the
high levels of concurrency of lots of threads. Wait for software to
catch up, they say.
Blogenes would retort with a categorical locution: If you control
something you make it work, if you don't you complain. I bet these
vendors do not control the software that needs to get ready for
concurrency. I say this as bluntly as I say that volume does not mean
laptops. After all Of what use is a blogger who doesn't hurt anybody's
feelings?
Read the original article: http://blogs.sun.com/hendel/entry/the_more_i_know_men |
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