2012.05.11 - welcome to the jungle

since about 5-8 years now the free lunch is over. we now live in a parallel world – like it or not, this is the reality. this is not over, however. a new revolution has started – we're already starting to work on heterogeneous hardware (nowadays most common setup is computing on CPU and GP/GPU). but it is not over. next step is heterogeneous hardware in a cloud (see: Hardware as a service, or short: HaaS). at that state one can imagine network interface as yet another bus, that connects more computational power.

the idea has been presented recently by Herb Sutter in the article welcome to the jungle. the name comes from the fact, that we'll have quite a set of different hardware, some of it specialized for a special purpose computations, and we'll have to deal with it, on the language level. we'll need tools, abstractions, some new algorithms and guidelines. all of it to keep the jungle at bay.

despite the article, there is also a presentation on that – see Herb's presentation on WttJ. it is all really worth your time, since it is the highly probable course of actions, in the mainstream of IT, for around the next decade or more.

we already have NUMA caches and memories. lots of ppl probably already have it on their desks. and more's to come… Moore's law is predicted to come to an end (physics does have its limits – atoms do have a non-zero size). we already are in a funny position, where you can put more transistors on a die, but you cannot power them, since it would make the whole chip overheat. sooner or later we'll need to separate computations elements in space and provide a loosely coupled computational power… wait a minute – did someone said “cloud”? :)