Was Moore's law, now something else, parallelism

[dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 09:48:45AM -0400, Mark Woodward wrote:
> Disks aren't getting much faster, sure a ms here and there, SATA is an 
> improvement, but nothing earth shattering. Solid state disks will 
> probably fix this, but its a few years out as to when they'll be cost 
> effective in a practical sense. A 1TB disk is less than $90. That's an 
> astounding amount of storage.

Nah. I used to think that, but I have almost 5 TB in my MythTV
backend now. 

> Networking isn't getting much faster without switching away from copper, 
> even fiber is only incrementally faster.

I don't have a 10Gb/s copper ethernet switch in my house yet, but they are
commercially available. Someday that will be cheap.

As for to-the-house bandwidth -- that varies from place to
place. Clearly it's better in Japan.

> A number of processes make sense for parallel processing, but its hard 
> to do. People in the industry are complaining that it is a "language 
> issue" in that we don't have the languages to express parallel 
> processing well. Maybe.

It's a brain issue, because it's hard for users and programmers to think
in parallel terms.

> A last problem, somewhat unrelated, disk size vs electronic 
> communication. How long does it take top copy the data we are capable of 
> generating? I have a digital video camera with a 4G SD card. It is not a 
> quick operation to copy that data. It is a very long operation, on a 
> practical basis, to copy data from one device to another.

It's one of those problems which has many solutions. Some of the
constraints are economic.

For instance, you could use PC disk quality SSDs for camera
storage, use an eSATA interface, and copy at 140MB/s instead of
6. It would be expensive, and what we think of now as bulky --
although it would neither be expensive nor bulky to a
professional photographer from 2000.

-dsr-


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