

Fleet: a radically different architecture for computing - blasdel
http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/06/30/fleet/

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gruseom
Wow, this is the biggest idea I've seen in computing in some time. It makes me
wish I knew more about hardware. The fact that it involves Ivan Sutherland,
one of the great visionaries from the early days, is really cool. If you don't
know who Ivan Sutherland is, watch the following now (it's not long and, trust
me, you need to know about this):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg>

Sutherland's Sketchpad system is from 1962; the video is Alan Kay talking
about it in the 80s. The best bit is at 3:45, where Kay says: _I once asked
Ivan Sutherland: How could you possibly have done the first interactive
graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, and the first
object-oriented software system all in one year? He said: I didn't know it was
hard._

If you want to see it do 3D, go to 4:00 of this:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKM3CmRqK2o>

That Sutherland did these things in the early 60s never fails to astound. The
machine it ran on was built in 1956.

Regarding the Fleet stuff, one thing I noticed is that they're using Guy
Blelloch's work on data parallelism from the 90s, which is also the basis for
the recent work on parallelism in Haskell. (Edit: turns out this is one of the
models they're considering for programming Fleet, but it isn't a perfect fit.
See the link to the other slides posted by abecedarius.)

~~~
jberryman
So basically this will be like a LISP machine, execpt a haskell machine?
Because that would be awesome. ...also this entire topic is completely over my
head.

~~~
blasdel
This isn't a Haskell machine, but the Reduceron is:
<http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/>

Fleet is more like a higher-level FPGA machine -- instead of mapping async-
default logic designs onto a huge array of look-up-tables, Fleet executes
async-default program code on a huge array of 'ships'.

People are routinely baffled trying to use FPGAs because HDLs are _NOT CODE_
\-- there's no clean abstraction between the text you write and
electricity+wires. Verilog + VHDL are more like CAD tools than they are like
programming languages, despite appearances.

Fleet may be a deeply weird computer architecture, but it's a lot more
palatable than using FPGAs for software guys.

~~~
dkersten
I'm not sure, I mean, they ARE code, just not sequential imperative code like
we are used to. I would argue that they are DATAFLOW languages, since
electronic circuits function in the same fashion (a stream of data is routed,
NOT a stream of instructions applied to some data).

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abecedarius
More at <http://fleet.cs.berkeley.edu/>

<http://fleet.cs.berkeley.edu/docs/slides.pdf> seems a better intro to the
project, with more of the basics (I haven't finished it yet).

~~~
MaysonL
I just submitted the fleet link before I saw this - it is definitely an
interesting design.

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jacquesm
Anything that has Ivan Sutherland in it bears close observation.

I learned just about all I know about computer graphics from his textbooks and
it still amazes me how relevant those books are today. The guy is definitely
one of the 'great' names in the history of computing.

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elbenshira
This architecture may sound ridiculous now, but I'm glad researchers are
attempting to redefine how a computer should work. The most troubling thing I
see about Fleet is the difficulty of programming on it. That is, unlearning
what we already know.

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mblakele
"A recent 90 nanometer TSMC test chip, called Infinity, demonstrated switch
fabric performance at about 4 GHz. A new test chip, called Marina, has just
gone out for fabrication. Marina will test the programmable interface, and if
successful, will give us confidence to build a complete Fleet. We seek
participation from sponsors, programmers, and designers of basic computation
elements."

It sounds like it's far too early to know how 4-GHz "switch fabric
performance" will translate into MIPS or FLOPS, much less application-level
performance.

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wglb
It wasn't until the end of the article that I realized that it was _the_
Sutherland of graphics fame. His early work was profound, and ahead of what
everyone else was doing. I remember reading the original paper (or maybe it
just was an early one) on the hidden line problem.

It is great to see some research at this level. Feels like we have been
building stuff that is based on the 8085, constrained by compatibility.
Everybody but Burroughs, that is, what with their b1700.

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swixmix
How do these compare to the MARDAN and Apollo Guidance Computers?

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dkersten
Yes! A modern dataflow processor! I really hope this is successful.

