Re: Taos paper (fwd) (long)

[Eugen Leitl <ui22204@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 16 Aug 1995 rdm@tad.micro.umn.edu wrote:

> These people sure are modest, though I'm not sure if I really need to
> buy a holy grail.

Grant them some bit of grandesse:
these few guys really created an impressive design.
 
> More to the point, this paper doesn't give a hint of how to design
> properly for a taos system.  [e.g. what kind of time penalty does
> message passing have?  Where's the tradeoff between "the complete Open

In-node message passing is very fast. I don't know how they route
in the network, though. They are either using links or FIFOs with
other processors. Especially interesting is a distributed application,
dynamically allocating resources on a heterogenous system. This
has not been done before, ever.

I strongly recommend you to read Dick's article. I found the paper
I forwarded technically very weak as compared to his article.

> System" and "programs [that] can take advantage of special purpose
> hardware to run specific objects?"

They are using lots of small lightweight threads. Tool size is
typicall tiny. Implemenations language is TaosVM assembly, though
they planned a C++, etc. sometime. Taos port to a new processor
takes currently 6 man-months. Loadtime translation is purported
to be faster than a HD can provide data.

The point of Taos is to provide a consistant interface to 
heterogenous software, lots of tools running on any system,
maspar msg-passing OOP paradim support and intelligent load
leveling.

Games and set-top boxes are application targets. Supercomputing?
I dunno.

> And, as with any sparkling new technology, I really want to know: how
> is it being disseminated into the educational system?  Any industrial
> "literacy requirement" which isn't supported by educators is going to
> wither.
> 
> [Hmm... I suppose some of these comments might apply to misc as well.]

This is the main point. Anything grand and new will perish if
not accepted by the market. I very much doubt Taos will be a mass 
product. (And Dick reviewed it _two_ times. Anything he reviewed so
far sank as a lead baloon. Now it will be probably at least an osmium
baloon).

-- Eugene

P.S. I lost track of Taos' progress: it is not cheap and I don't have
a parallel box at home, yet. Lead baloon.

> -- 
> Raul
>