Author: Albert Silver
Date: 09:52:29 01/23/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 23, 2000 at 12:07:11, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>On January 23, 2000 at 10:14:09, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On January 23, 2000 at 03:01:38, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>>
>>>On January 22, 2000 at 23:50:46, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>>in the great scheme of things very much. You want to make silly suggestions,
>>>>and then don't like it when someone points out why they are silly. As far as
>>>
>>>How about my silly suggestion that DB would run reasonably fast on a PC? Based
>>>on FHH's own estimates, I guess it's not that silly, eh?
>>>
>>>I've tried to reason with you, others have tried to reason with you, it just
>>>doesn't work. Don't expect me to post to this thread any more.
>>>
>>>-Tom
>>
>>I won't follow up any more either, as 'shouting' doesn't make something
>>true. But you have _never_ explained why Hsu would invest a year or more
>>to convert his code to the PC (probably more like 2 years). IE I'm not
>>going to spend any time trying to get my code to run on a blender's cpu.
>>There is no reason to do so...
>
>*sigh* I can't help myself...
>
>I actually DID explain why Hsu would invest a year or more to convert his code
>to the PC: money.
>
>Here's what you _never_ explained: why would it take 2 years to make DB/PC? I
>can throw a good chess program together in a month, and probably less if I
>already knew which terms and weights I wanted in the evaluation function. Even
>if FHH didn't want to start from scratch, what's to keep him from directly
>porting the DB software? What makes the SP so different from a 4-way Pentium
>Xeon? Or a 1-way Celeron, for that matter? Zugzwang is a pretty huge program
>that usually runs on a massively multiprocessor PowerPC computer, but it only
>takes a few minutes to get Zugzwang to run on a PC, too. Are you trying to say
>that the DB software is so poorly engineered (perhaps riddled with SP assembly)
>that porting it would take years? I know that MUCH bigger programs have been
>ported from the PC to the Mac in a matter of weeks...
>
>-Tom
In hardware, I could be considered at best as an enlightened know-nothing, so I
won't pretend to be entering the argument here. I'm curious though. Is the SP
really no different from a PC except that it is bigger (and faster)? I mean take
the Cray for example, or any supercomputer for that matter; I would have thought
that it also involved massively different electronics permitting wondrous
things, but only if the software were specifically written to exploit these
differences. So a PC program that was simply emulated in it would be taking no
advantage of what it had to offer. This would mean that such
supercomputer-specific programs would be pretty much impossible to port over, as
the program depends on this hardware, and to be ported would have to be
literally rewritten. And even if this were successfully done would be pretty
much unusable. In other words by the time all the necessary changes were made to
make it work it would be a different program. If this were the case also for DB,
the end result wouldn't be DB, but just inspired from DB.
Albert Silver
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