[erlang-questions] Proposal for new Q&A site in Stack Exchange

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 20/12/2011, at 10:27 PM, uberdeveloper wrote:
> 2) Multi-core architecture is hitting the peak but still most of the
> applications don't use even 4 cores (forget nodes). I also researched
> a few computer courses offered in colleges(not an extensive research)
> and found Distributed, Parallel computing isn't thought critically.

I'm a bit puzzled by this.  I run a 4th year concurrent programming
paper with the ultimate aim of getting some of the concepts pushed
earlier.  I'm careful to distinguish between parallel computing
(using e.g., OpenMP or Cilk, where the number of active threads is
an aspect of *implementation*, not an aspect of *design*) and
concurrent programming, where process structure is part of the
design and often part of the modelling phase.  I'm also careful to
distinguish between distributed computing (which brings in issues
of network reliability and of security) and concurrent programming
as such.

When I think about all the "middleware" issues in designing distributed
systems I get dizzy contemplating all that I'm not able to fit in...

So what would "thought critically" involved?  I am very keen to improve
my paper, I *know* it has a long way to go.

There was a number-crunching system done in Erlang, using binaries with
embedded tags to hold Matlab-like arrays.  Come to think of it, the
computer algebra system I've been using lately, SAGE, is written in
Python, and delegates to a variety of back ends.