From: "James Rogers" <jamesr@best.com>
> A more accurate way of describing it is that there is no OS currently in
> existence (that I know of) that intrinsically supports general massive
> parallelism.
That's true. Other than the human brain, the only system using massive
parallelism is the Internet. An attempt to use Net parallelism is folding @
home http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm/
In his book _Afterthought, The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence_,
James Bailey suggests that "the exclusive franchise of human thought as the
mechanism for understanding the world no longer holds" and he recommends not
only parallel processing but also parallel operating systems, that is, let
operating systems compete in parallel to evolve the most robust and stable
network.
There are people working on massive parallel computing. For instance:
Center for Advanced Scientific Computing.
http://heron.cc.ukans.edu/
This Center will organize and administer a
broad new research program in ultraparallel computation.
Its major areas of technical activity will include:
.ip
\(bu Study of Scientific Applications by use of Large-Scale Parallel
Computation
.ip
\(bu Study and Development of Parallel Mathematical Software
.ip
\(bu Numerical Analysis for Parallel Computation
.ip
\(bu Computer Science Research
.ip
\(bu Establishment of a Nationally Accessible Parallel-Computation
Research Environment
.ip
\(bu Research in Advanced Parallel Architectures
.ip
\(bu Hardware Experiments
> Also, there isn't a lot of
> appropriate hardware to run it on lying around.
Furthermore, the available appropriate hardware is still rather expensive.
Four or five years ago SGI bought Cray computer for $700 million. Today I
guess it's worth about $80 - $100 million, but that's still more than I make
all year.
©¿©¬
Useless hypotheses, etc.:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism, GAC, Cyc, Eliza, cryonics, individual
uniqueness, ego, human values
Everything that can happen has already happened, not just once,
but an infinite number of times, and will continue to do so forever.
(Everything that can happen = more than anyone can imagine.)
We won't move into a better future until we debunk religiosity, the most
regressive force now operating in society.
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