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Dec. 16th, 2006
Question: Is COBOL the only programming language whose Standard definition handling of decimal currency?
Answer: PL/1 and Rexx are ANSI Standards and both have decimal datatypes. Likewise, C# and VB.NET have standard decimal types - and all of these are designed for currency and general arithmetic. We'll soon see decimal in hardware, thanks to IBM's Power6 architecture, which will be incorporating what may be the first-ever decimal floating-point unit in silicon.
Question: How many new lines of COBOL source code currently in use and how many new lines are added each year?
Answer: 250 billion lines of COBOL source code currently in use and 1.5 billion new lines of COBOL source code are added each year.
Answer: PL/1 and Rexx are ANSI Standards and both have decimal datatypes. Likewise, C# and VB.NET have standard decimal types - and all of these are designed for currency and general arithmetic. We'll soon see decimal in hardware, thanks to IBM's Power6 architecture, which will be incorporating what may be the first-ever decimal floating-point unit in silicon.
Question: How many new lines of COBOL source code currently in use and how many new lines are added each year?
Answer: 250 billion lines of COBOL source code currently in use and 1.5 billion new lines of COBOL source code are added each year.
Next: Chapel or X10 or Fortless
Dec. 16th, 2006 12:04 pmCray and IBM were selected for Phase III of the High Productivity Computing Systems program (HPCS) managed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a third competitor, Sun Microsystems, was dropped. Cray will receive $250 million and IBM $244 million to develop prototype systems by 2010. The prototypes will have to show a path to computing more than 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second (petaflops). HPCS machines should be capable of 2 to 4 petaflops, compared with more than 200 teraflops for the IBM Blue Gene/L system that leads the Top500 list today. Also, new machines should hit between 8,000 and
64, 000 gups (giga-updates per second - how fast a system can update a random part of its memory), compared with just 35 for today's Blue Gene/L. For benchmark details, please take a look at: http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc
A continuing evaluation of Cray's Chapel, IBM's X10 and Sun's Fortress languages aims to choose a lingua franca for programming such next-generation systems, which are expected to use tens of thousands of processors, sometimes of various flavors. Today's largest computers typically use the Message Passing Interface (MPI) libraries, developed by a committee of academic researchers a decade ago to link COBOL and FORTRAN programs across tens or hundreds of off-the-shelf processors ganged in large clusters.
Professor at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) Marc Snir who had a hand in MPI's development said that a more evolutionary alternative would be to move to emerging languages such as Co-Array FORTRAN or Universal Parallel C, because those languages require smaller advances in compiler technology, but they have gotten little traction thus far. Neither DARPA nor the three companies are providing many details about the competing languages. Marc Snir said Cray's Chapel is the closest to MPI because it is focused on data parallelism. IBM's X10 introduces new ideas such as atomic data structures and asynchronous processes. Sun's Fortress which has been described as "Matlab on steroids", would require the most aggressive changes in compilers of the trio, Snir said.
64, 000 gups (giga-updates per second - how fast a system can update a random part of its memory), compared with just 35 for today's Blue Gene/L. For benchmark details, please take a look at: http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc
A continuing evaluation of Cray's Chapel, IBM's X10 and Sun's Fortress languages aims to choose a lingua franca for programming such next-generation systems, which are expected to use tens of thousands of processors, sometimes of various flavors. Today's largest computers typically use the Message Passing Interface (MPI) libraries, developed by a committee of academic researchers a decade ago to link COBOL and FORTRAN programs across tens or hundreds of off-the-shelf processors ganged in large clusters.
Professor at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) Marc Snir who had a hand in MPI's development said that a more evolutionary alternative would be to move to emerging languages such as Co-Array FORTRAN or Universal Parallel C, because those languages require smaller advances in compiler technology, but they have gotten little traction thus far. Neither DARPA nor the three companies are providing many details about the competing languages. Marc Snir said Cray's Chapel is the closest to MPI because it is focused on data parallelism. IBM's X10 introduces new ideas such as atomic data structures and asynchronous processes. Sun's Fortress which has been described as "Matlab on steroids", would require the most aggressive changes in compilers of the trio, Snir said.