That parallel-parallel Contibutor
October 12th, 2007Remember me muttering about array languages?
Just in case, famous Jhost7.exe is a J language execution process. So every computation in Contributor is performed by array-processing J machine, packed to xml and held as a blob in nodestate table.
So it's APL in Analyst and J in Contributor.
It's really cool, because array processing is functional & extremely parallel in nature.
So Contributor can beat virtually any competitor if folks at JSoftware (or in Cognos) will add a decent parallel-processing support and multi-core processors continue their march. It's a damn hard task, but it's easier than adding parallel support to imperative language products like Microsoft PP.
As far as I digged into J sparse matrix support there was a lot to be included and a lot to parallelize. It's so sad that the core code is closed by JSoftware...
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add a decent parallel-processing support and multi-core processors
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Yes, that’s what the Job system is for. Unfortunately, some tasks are still single-threaded.
Some meaning GTP and Synchronize?
Not that much, but I guess, you still need to create a master copy of application and that can only be done on a single unit of parallelism. Propagation of master copy can take advantage of distributed processing.