[interroboink]

I'm all in favor of making the best of what's available. But at the same time, if such thinking is taken as dogma, innovation suffers.

You spoke of one log, and the time scales involved. But suppose you have an entire forest of logs. Then it may indeed be worth breeding bigger oxen (or rather, inventing tractors).

I don't mean to accuse Hopper of shortsightedness, but when quotes by famous people, like the above, are thrown around without context, they encourage that dogmatic thinking.

So, I was more replying to that quote as it appeared here, rather than as it appeared in her talk.

[gffrd]

> if such thinking is taken as dogma, innovation suffers.

I don’t think there’s anything about the original post, with quote about oxen, that reads as dogmatic, or invites such perspective.

Also, I think we can all agree most innovation happens as an extension of “making the best of what’s available” rather than independent of it, on a fully separate track.

Using two oxen can lead to realizing a bigger ox would be beneficial.

[interroboink]

I don't mean to wear out this thread, and I totally respect your different viewpoint, but when I see:

  ... they're trying to tell us something. When we need greater
  computer power, the answer is not "get a bigger computer", it's
 "get another computer".

that does read as dogmatic advice to me, taken in isolation. It boils down to "the answer is X." Not "consider these factors" or "weigh these different options," but just "this is the answer, full stop."

That's dogma, no?

(that aside, I do slightly regret the snarkiness of my initial comment :)

[kortilla]

It is extremely rare that your compute workload has scaling properties that need just a little bit faster computer. The vast majority of the time if you are bound by hardware at all, the answer is to scale horizontally.

The only exception is really where you have a bounded task that will never grow in compute time.

[interroboink]

Perhaps I misunderstand you, but what about those decades where CPUs were made faster and faster, from a few MHz up to several GHz, before hitting physical manufacturing and power/heat limits?

Was that all just a bunch of wasted effort, and what they should have been doing was build more and more 50MHz chips?

Of course not. There are lots of advantages to scaling up rather than out.

Even today, there are clear advantages to using an "xlarge" instance on AWS rather than a whole bunch of "nano" ones working together.

But all this seems so straightforward that I suspect I really don't understand your point...

[kortilla]

>Perhaps I misunderstand you, but what about those decades where CPUs were made faster and faster, from a few MHz up to several GHz, before hitting physical manufacturing and power/heat limits?

If you waited for chips to catch up to your workload, you got smoked by any competitors who parallelized. Waiting even a year to double speed when you could just use two computers was still an eternity.

> Was that all just a bunch of wasted effort, and what they should have been doing was build more and more 50MHz chips?

No, that’s a stupid question and you know it. You set it up as a strawman to attack.

Hardware improvements are amazing and have let us do tons for much cheaper.

However, the ~4ghz CPUs we have now are not meaningfully faster in single thread performance compared to what you could buy literally a decade ago. If you’re sitting around waiting for 32ghz that should only be “3 years away”, you’re dead in the water. All modern improvements are power savings and density of parallel cores, which require you to face what Grace presented all those years ago.

Faster CPUs aren’t coming.

xlarge on AWS is a ton of parallel cores. Not faster.

[interroboink]

I just want to make one last attempt to get my point across, since I think you are discussing in good faith, even if I don't like your aggressive timbre.

There is risk in reinforcing a narrow-minded approach that "all we need is more oxen." It limits one's imagination. That's the essence of what I've been advocating against in this thread, though perhaps my attempts and examples have merely chummed your waters. Ironically, I'd say Grace Hopper rather agrees, elsewhere in the linked talk[1].

> Faster CPUs aren’t coming.

Not with that attitude, ya dingus (:

[1] "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si9iqF5uTFk&t=1420s

  I think the saddest phrase I ever hear in a computer installation
  is that horrible one "but we've always done it that way." That's a
  forbidden phrase in my office.

[pbhjpbhj]

In there context of an analogy for parallelism, a tractor is just a bigger oxen. The whole point seems to be instead of making a bigger X to do function Y one has the option to use multiple X at the same time.

[kortilla]

>But suppose you have an entire forest of logs. Then it may indeed be worth breeding bigger oxen

That’s idiotic unless you have other constraints. The parallelism allows you to also break apart the oxen to do multiple smaller logs at the same time when their combined force isn’t needed.