
Faster parallel computing – MIT News - tambourine_man
http://news.mit.edu/2016/faster-parallel-computing-big-data-0913
======
qwertyuiop924
MIT, you know I love you guys. I have a tremendous amount of respect for you
and your work, and you haven't yet eroded the good will you got for helping to
revolutionize computing on multiple occaisions, and also for establishing
Switzerland, and thus being responsible to some degree for Hacker culture, and
a whole other wide variety of important work, and the Lisp languages
(including Scheme) as we know them to today.

However, if you talk about how you've made significant advances to the state
of the art in a field, and talk about a really cool project you made with this
advance, _and you do not tell us how you did it and link the git repo_ , than
I don't care. Software is a collaborative effort. If you don't tell us how you
got a result, or only give general overviews, then we have to re-discover it,
re-implement it, and/or re-solve all the problems you solved. _if you 've made
advances and do not disclose them in detail, than you are holding us back._
and if your implementation is encumbered, write one that isn't, and give us
it.

Either way, if anyone claims to have made amazing advances in a certain field,
the first question you should be asking is, "where's your code."

~~~
chrisseaton
> for establishing Switzerland

Huh? I know you can't mean that the American university MIT established the
European country of Switzerland, so what do you mean? And how did that create
hacker culture?

~~~
qwertyuiop924
The AI Lab was commonly nicknamed Switzerland, as it was a neutral party
between MIT's CS laboratories after they split into two.

~~~
hga
Not the AI Lab, but Sussman and company's group that sort of stood between the
AI Lab and the Lab for Computing Science (LCS), which did more classical types
of CS.

E.g. artifacts that came from the AI Lab included the Lisp Machine and it's
Ethernet style Chaosnet, while LCS was working on a token ring network and
aside from their Nu machines and the NuBus, adopted by Apple, never made their
own workstations. Or Maclisp (I think at some point) and Scheme, vs. CLU.
Other things that came from LCS include RSA and the X window system (the
latter due to a weird VAX 11/750 config that DEC created so it could donate
them to MIT without suffering (much) from the GSA "Most Favored Customer"
requirement to give the Federal government the best price you gave anyone
else).

After some point Sussman and company created their own informal? unit which
stood apart, getting their money from the NSF and using Scheme, and doing
their own things, "Switzerland, Armed but Neutral", staying above/aside from
the fighting between LCS and the AI Lab. Which as I recall hearing, was only
resolved when the head of LCS died (but not before unduly influencing the
architecture of their new and _highly_ dysfunctional building), and the head
of the AI Lab, who'd saved it when other AI Labs like Stanford's legendary one
died, became the head of a combined Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory AKA CSAIL.

All the above is 2nd hand but from reliable sources, and remotely after
mid-1991.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Ah, thanks. Sorry. I always confuse AI and Switzerland, as both derived from
project MAC. Both were important, and are generally more famous than LCS,
although LCS was arguably more influential.

It doesn't help matters that Switzerland was sometimes called project MAC,
which was the original name for the collective. To further confuse matters,
[https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/mac/)
is the Switzerland website, and it looks like Switzerland is kind of still
going, even after the CSAIL merge. Unless the site's just outdated, which is
also a possibility.

~~~
hga
Last time I checked, which was a few years ago but quite some time after the
creation of CSAIL, Switzerland was going strong. Last tidbit was their dismay
to discover the very high ceiling of the space they were in was a couple or
three inches too short per Cambridge zoning rules to subdivide into 2 levels.

BTW, it's really hard to understate how horrible a building the Strata Center
is for the people inside it who are, you know, trying to get work done, in
fact, it's akin and often directly an example of the current open office fad.

Or for people trying to get to them, due to it's inherently horrible physical
security. In terms of sheer incompetence, though, it's hard to beat creating a
loading dock area for mail and freight to replace Building 20's modest
facilities that trucks can't actually get into and out of....

After blowing most of almost half a billion on it, MIT has a lot of nerve
asking for more money for more buildings.

Disclaimer: big fan of Building 20, which served as an indispensable
incubator, and allowed me to set up a student run computer center in 1980,
there's no place else in the Institute where that would have been vaguely
easy, or probably even possible.

Yeah, it was a nightmare to maintain, and occupied very valuable space on
campus, but there's no excuse for not creating another space to serve the same
function, modulo the ease of knocking vertical or horizontal holes, and its
extremely high load bearing capability (200 lb/sq ft as I recall). MIT simply
won't be creating new groups of people in new fields as fast as it used to.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Being outside of MIT, I don't exactly know what you're talking about, but it
doesn't sound good.

~~~
tinkerdol
He/she is talking about the newer home of CSAIL, the Stata Center:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center)

It is notoriously difficult to work in, with way too many open spaces (open in
the sense of being public, as well as open in the sense of having random
3-story-high atriums of air above you in some places for no discernable
reason) and not enough quiet nooks that are conductive to focused work.

~~~
hga
Ah, yeah, sorry about that qwertyuiop924, and thank you tinkerdol for filling
him in sooner, and confirming what I've heard from other sources.

It shows every sign of being a two for one own goal in diminishing MIT's
future ability to "be MIT".

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Ouch. Yeah, that would suck. But then, IIRC, people have been saying that X is
dimishing MIT's future ability to be MIT since before the death of 6.001. I
suspect it's another manifestation of the same kind of human impulse that
makes the elders of every generation decry the youth of the next ones. And a
bad building design isn't impossible to work around, just very, very, very,
very inconvenient.

But then, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get
you.

~~~
hga
There's 2 things here:

The incubator that was Building 20 was is _gone_ , as far as I know. Many many
good things came out of it, some of which got very big, starting with the
Research Lab For Electronics right after WWII (it was previously the main
building for the "MIT Radiation Lab", i.e. a place to prototype and in some
cases build small lots of RADARs). As of the '80s, some of its 3 phase ceiling
busbars were still live, one of my favorite professor's coffepot ran straight
off one.

That's a relatively subtle thing, but to the extent MIT becomes stolid and not
doing new things, becomes more of a place run by consensus and the
conventional wisdom, that would be an important thing to look at.

The second is of course the Stata Building. It will absolutely diminish the
useful output of what's now CSAIL, if for no other reason than those who need
to be able to work without distraction by and large won't be able to in the
building. It's the sort of thing that can put a ceiling on the difficultly of
projects people will be able to do, if they can't get into or stay long enough
in flow.

Obviously people will work around this, using e.g. laptops in quiet places,
but collaboration will then seriously suffer if past research on the subject
is of any validity (e.g. > 30 feet? or a stairway makes a _big_ difference).

I don't know if anyone was out to get them, it's just that a) people who had
weird and very wrong ideas about how to do things, like the head of the LCS,
who among many other things tried to physically enshrine a permanent
disconnection between CS and AI, b) people who simply didn't give a shit about
those who really were going to use it, and/or c) people who were grossly
incompetent, were in charge of getting it designed and built, but not the
actual "users".

And the screwups are legion. Tom Knight, #1 Lisp Machine designer back in the
day and someone who did a _lot_ of important stuff, now a "synthetic
biologist" AKA into artificial life, asked for _one thing_ , a floor that
sloped to a drain. Which he didn't get. And I now notice as of 2008 he's doing
this at a company he co-founded.

I suspect those two fact are not entirely coincidental. And potentially a
grave loss to MIT, that part of the future just might not be done there,
losing "The Godfather of Synthetic Biology" per Wikipedia is not a small
thing.

And I have the tiniest window into CSAIL, and can speak freely about it (my
one theoretically vulnerable source isn't really, and hasn't told me anything
I can't repeat), there's I'm sure much much more to be told, and sifted
through by historians or archaeologists of science someday.

6.001 is a rather different thing, after the dot.com crash, which resulted in
a crash of EECS undergraduate enrollment, less than half after being 40% of
the student body for decades, people panicked, those with an agenda against
Scheme/LISP used the opening, but primarily, MIT decided an MIT EECS degree
was going to be a fundamentally different thing.

That doesn't mean they're wrong, just that if you're looking a focus on the
6.001/SICP sort of thing, you might want to look elsewhere, like CMU I think.
And maybe this was inevitable, a department like MIT's or UCB's is simply
never going to be the same as a CS focused department that didn't grow out of
an EE one. And Sussman at least always thought the 2 subjects were both of
great importance and should be taught together, he himself just never figured
out a way to really make that work, including at least one experimental one
year long course covering both prior to the development of SICP and the 4
6.001-4 courses.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
That's fair enough. I didn't say the removal of 6.001 was bad, but many
decried it as the death of MIT.

But in short, you're saying that MIT may no longer be "where the future
happens."

That's quite possible. But at the moment, there's still an abundance of talent
there. OTOH, the lack of an incubator is a problem.

I guess what I'm saying is that you might be right, ut the future is pretty
hard to predict.

~~~
hga
_But in short, you 're saying that MIT may no longer be "where the future
happens."_

Or maybe MIT is now starting to seriously revert to the mean, _some_ of the
future will most certainly happen there, just potentially quite a bit less.

I _may_ have seen some of that in the '80s, certainly the midnight execution
of the Applied Biology department by envious chemistry and biology professor
administrators was a sign of some sort, especially since the fate of the
latter should have been much worse than having their administrative careers
ended. The faculty as a whole certainly viewed it as a betrayal, which is was
in spirit and "law" (MIT has the institution of the Visiting Committee to keep
units of it on the straight and narrow, they were of course ignored in this).

And this is part of a bigger trend, pure administrators are growing in vast
numbers in US higher education, their costs are one of the biggest drivers in
this clearly unsustainable trend, they're funded by ever more Federal dollars
(even if laundered as loans, which the Feds entirely took over in 2010), and
from money comes power, they're taking over US universities from the faculty.
Who themselves are getting segregated into small numbers of high cost tenured
and large quantities of low cost associates who care barely make ends meet,
plus the old bane of graduate student instructors who aren't good at it.

MIT, at least for now, is not going to succumb to some of these trends, as
long as associate professors are rare exceptions that prove the rule, like SF
author Joe Haldeman, for classes are otherwise taught by tenured or tenure
track faculty, and _adequate_ teaching ability is required for tenure, as well
as the _minor_ detail of being #1 or #2 in your subfield (as judged, in part,
by those Visiting Committees).

Similarly, like CalTech, there's a high floor on admitting undergraduates,
they've got be able to do one term of the calculus beyond the AP BC sequence,
and calculus based mechanics and physics (and chemistry and maybe biology).

But....

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Yeah. My father went to CMU, and told me some stories about a few professors
that were... less than enthusiastic about teaching. Like one that was pretty
much using the class for his reseach project, and didn't teach the intended
subject matter. At all.

------
smallnamespace
Isn't this the same sort of idea as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gather-
scatter_(vector_address...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gather-
scatter_\(vector_addressing\)), just with more thought around timing of the
loads/stores and cache hierarchy?

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
It's similar, but a key difference is that Milk is deferring the exact timing
of access in order to do a sort. You can build the same thing atop
scatter/gather primitives but they don't do that for you themselves.

