davidpratten.com

My Underwater Running World Record attempt took a hit today, being rejected by the people at Guinness World Records. They were very polite:

Dear Mr Pratten,

Thank you for sending us the details of your recent record proposal for ‘Underwater Running’. We are afraid to say that we are unable to accept this as a Guinness World Record.

We receive over 60,000 enquiries a year from which only a small proportion are approved by our experienced researchers to establish new categories. These are not ‘made up’ to suit an individual proposal, but rather ‘evolve’ as a result of international competition in a field, which naturally accommodates superlatives of the sort that we are interested in. We think you will appreciate that we are bound to favour those that reflect the greatest interest.

We realize that this will be disappointing to you. However, we have considered your proposal fully; in the context of the specific subject area and that of records as a whole, and our decision is final in this matter.

Once again thank you for your interest in Guinness World Records.

Yours sincerely,

(signed)
Records Management Team

There definitely is a lack of “international competition” in the Underwater Running “field” - perhaps that accounts for their lack of interest.

Pramati announced Dekoh this week. Dekoh is a platform that supports applications that run both on over the network and on the desktop. It embodies some of the ideas of an Hypertext Computer (HTC):

Dekoh Desktop is a small footprint download that can be installed on user’s desktop in a single click. Dekoh Desktop includes a web server on which applications written using open standards like JSP, Ajax, DHTML, Flash can be deployed and accessed thru a web browser. Applications deployed on Dekoh Desktop are automatically enabled for web 2.0 functions like tagging, sharing, commenting, rating, etc.

Dekoh Network allows controlled sharing of applications or content on the web. A user can share application/content on his or her desktop with a buddy, who can go to userID.dekoh.net and access it. The key thing to note is that the user is not required to upload different kind of content to different websites. Instead, the shared content and applications remain on the desktop and are served from there.

In particular, the presentation of the computing resources of the desktop to the world as a web server is an idea that is common to both Dekoh and HTC. The biggest difference between HTC and Dekoh is that Dekoh does not seem to address code mobility issues, instead, the choice by the programmer of using Dekoh does carry with it a choice about the locus of processing — it will be on your desktop.

Today I submitted the papers to Guinness World Records (GWR) for an attempt to set a world record for running 20metres underwater.

Yes - it is possible to run underwater. Although, as far as I know there is no current world record for this discipline!

Hopefully GWR will approve my attempt before the water in Sydney gets too cold! Time to get into shape!

A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflops) has been unveiled by Intel.

see the BBC report.

This new chip presents a great challenge to the programming community. The proposed HTC may be part of solving these challenges.

The BBC report continues.

The challenge

“It’s not too difficult to find two or four independent things you can do concurrently, finding 80 or more things is more difficult, especially for desktop applications.

“It is going to require quite a revolution in software programming.

“Massive parallelism has been the preserve of the minority - a few people doing high-performance scientific computing.

“But that sort of thing is going to have to find its way into the mainstream.”

What is one of the causes of this problem?

Current programming models are built on strong assumptions about continuity of the location of processing. This is true of common programming tools and languages (e.g. Java, C, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Perl, Delphi, Pascal, Kylix, Python, SQL, JavaScript, C, SAS, COBOL, IDL, Lisp, Fortran, Ada, MATLAB, RPG) but is also true of explicitly distributed projects like seti@home and the Windows Communication Foundation.

One of the challenges in “finding 80 or more things” to do at once is overcoming the assumption of continuity of the locus of programming. Doing parallel programming using current programming models is tough. The programmer is constantly fighting the assumptions that underpin the language that she is programming in.

Contribution of the HTC

The HTC is, in part, an attempt to eliminate the effect of programmers implicitly making choices about where processing will be done through their choice of technology. Core concepts of the HTC are that

1. all computing resources are presented as the ability to complete HTTP requests,
2. HTC programs reference all input information as URLs.
3. the HTC depends on an extended HTTP which includes an offer of assistance along with the request for the information at a URL. The HTTP request becomes “please give me the information located in information space at this URL, and by the way, I have processing and storage available in my HTC and I am happy to help with the processing involved.” The HTC serving the request may
   • return the HTML of a page, or
   • code that calculates it. The returned code would, of course, reference its input data in the same way - as further URLs.

The HTC brings the network right into the core of programming and removes completely any assumptions about the location of processing. If the 80-core chip was programmed as an HTC - any request for a result could be performed on the same processor, another one of the 80 on the chip or - for that matter - on a computer with spare capacity 1/2 a world away.

Extending the typical RPC model with an offer to help compute the results in one stroke enables:

• code mobility,
• removal of all assumptions of continuity of locus of programming, and
• can provide “80 or more things” to do.