Azul Java Server

[Luc The Perverse]

I was looking on Roedy Green's site about Azul servers that cost around 3/4
million dollars and it occurred to me that one of those would be really nice
to play solitaire on.

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/azul.html

 

[Roedy Green]

I was looking on Roedy Green's site about Azul servers that cost around 3/4
million dollars and it occurred to me that one of those would be really nice
to play solitaire on.

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/azul.html

I worked on a project called Athena Integer some years ago that ran
out of money. I was a multithreaded, multiuser spreadsheet. My old
boss is reviving the project. One of the interesting discoveries is
spreadsheet logic can often be implemented multithreaded with
non-interfering threads. Back then we did benchmarks on a spreadsheet
with 256-cpu machine.

 

[Oliver Wong]

I was looking on Roedy Green's site about Azul servers that cost around 3/4
million dollars and it occurred to me that one of those would be really
nice to play solitaire on.

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/azul.html

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.

- Oliver

 

[Stefan Ram]

One of the interesting discoveries is spreadsheet logic can
often be implemented multithreaded with non-interfering
threads. Back then we did benchmarks on a spreadsheet with
256-cpu machine.

There are also spreadsheet-metaphore-based programming
environments (this is, however, now off the Java topic):

»Cells is a mature, stable extension to CLOS that allows
you to create classes, the instances of which have slots
whose values are determined by a formula. Think of the
slots as cells in a spreadsheet (get it?), and you've got
the right idea. You can use any arbitrary Common Lisp
expression to specify the value of a cell. The Cells
system takes care of tracking dependencies among cells,
and propagating values.«

http://common-lisp.net/project/cells/

 

[Timo Stamm]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.

Or a laptop


Timo

 

[Luc The Perverse]

I worked on a project called Athena Integer some years ago that ran
out of money. I was a multithreaded, multiuser spreadsheet. My old
boss is reviving the project. One of the interesting discoveries is
spreadsheet logic can often be implemented multithreaded with
non-interfering threads. Back then we did benchmarks on a spreadsheet
with 256-cpu machine.

Did it scale well?

 

[Roedy Green]

Did it scale well?

yes. That was the pleasant surprise. I speculated back then that
spreadsheet logic then might become the preferred way for end users to
customise business logic apps. It may yet happen.

 

[Gerbrand van Dieijen]

Stefan Ram schreef:

There are also spreadsheet-metaphore-based programming
environments (this is, however, now off the Java topic):

»Cells is a mature, stable extension to CLOS that allows
you to create classes, the instances of which have slots
whose values are determined by a formula. Think of the
slots as cells in a spreadsheet (get it?), and you've got
the right idea. You can use any arbitrary Common Lisp
expression to specify the value of a cell. The Cells
system takes care of tracking dependencies among cells,
and propagating values.«

http://common-lisp.net/project/cells/

Sounds very similar to Haskell: http://www.haskell.org
Haskell is an functional language:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction#What_is_functional_programming.3F

Haskell is said to be very well suited for multiprocessor systems. A
functional program could very well be distributed over multiple cores,
without the developer having to worry about concurency.
Unfortunatelly, haskell-compilers or not yet that efficient so this is
only in thoery.
I like Java, but when you use Haskell, even the new typing system of
Java (Generics e.d.) seems very primitive and insufficient.

 

[Stefan Ram]

Sounds very similar to Haskell: http://www.haskell.org

»However, one can imagine printing the cells of a
spreadsheet in textual form, like this:
A1 = 3
A2 = A1-32
A3 = A2 * 5/9
and then it plainly is a (functional) program.«

http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/excel/excel.pdf