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hinkleytoday at 12:24 AM2 repliesview on HN

You already don’t have a choice. The reason we are all in the cloud is that hardware stopped scaling properly vertically and had to scale horizontally, and we needed abstractions that kept us from going insane doing that.

If you really want to dumb down what I’m suggesting, it’s is tantamount to blade servers with a better backplane, treating the box as a single machine instead of a cluster. If IPC replaces a lot of the RPC, you kick the Amdahl’s Law can down the road at least a couple of process cycles before we have to think of more clever things to do.

We didn’t have any of the right tooling in place fifteen years ago when this problem first started to be unavoidable, but is now within reach, if not in fact extant.


Replies

CyberDildonicstoday at 2:17 AM

It's tricky to decode all this but there are a lot of misconceptions.

First, amdahl's law just says that the non parallel parts of a program become more of a bottleneck as the parallel parts are split up more. It's trivial and obvious, it has nothing to do with being able to scale to more cores because it has nothing to do with how much can be parallelized.

Second in your other comment, there is nothing special about "rust having the semantics" for NUMA. People have been programming NUMA machines since they existed (obviously). NUMA just means that some memory addresses are local and some are not local. If you want things to be fast you need to use the addresses that are local as much as possible.