eigen.systems

about

It is not very often that the world of software is shaken up by sweeping change. The last time this happened was when the cost of programming began to overwhelm the cost of computers.

Year after year, Moore’s law delivered faster processors, and the best minds in computer science focussed on how to keep the cost of software down. Structured, easier to write and free(er) from error-prone tedium, all good, but basically to get better quality for lower cost

Moore’s law remains with us, but it no longer delivers faster processors. We can’t clock the processors any faster if we don’t want them to burn up. We can have a lot more of them, though!

And so, buying new machines could actually SLOW your old sequential apps down. The next hop in speedup is going to be delivered by parallel code. And it is not going to be easy…

That’s going to shake things up a bit – big changes initially bring about a profusion of alternatives to cope and adapt. Over time, the dust settles and we settle into a new equilibrium. Remember the babel-esque plethora of programming languages (ada, B, algol, pascal, snobol, lisp and that’s only the memorable ones) we had not so long ago? Well, happy days are here again.

And so, we devote this blog to keeping an eye firmly on how things go from here – a subtle knife to travel to parallel worlds.