Talk:Stream processing

Future todos

I would have added this myself but I'm quite busy at the moment and I admit it's a difficult read for me. I am speaking about a paper on conditional streams. I'll post more detail in the future.
Anyone ever used StreamC or Brook (two streaming languages)? I did not so I cannot write about this but I am the first in being interested with this.

MaxDZ8 09:47, 27 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Update: there are also some nVIDIA papers speaking about Brook for GPUs and pointing of a site which I don't remember just now. MaxDZ8 13:29, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

In C, a star combined with a data type means a pointer of that type, not an array as this article claims. The kicker is that in C, arrays are simulated via pointers, but it is disingenuous to say that the latter is the former. -FWIW.

I disagree with the initial characterization of stream processing as MIMD. Imagine is a SIMD machine; the fragment processing pipelines of GPUs are also SIMD. Certainly it's MD, but by no means is it MI.

Well, I believe you have your rights in saying this. My point is that having multiple execution units would effectively allow to execute different instructions. I also believe I've read this on some papers so I've reported this. I admit however I am not really used to MIMD so if you want to change the page feel free to do it. MaxDZ8 07:42, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Update: the more I think at it, the more I don't understand why this is not MIMD. A computer cluster is by sure means MIMD. This means there are different instructions in flight and different data sets. Suppose the following scenario: pipeline0 is processing a lenghty loop while pipeline1 is not (say it breaked it for some reason). There will be multiple instructions in flight. Maybe you're speaking about the paradigm itself? This may be true but it still "allow Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) data processing" (quote from article). MaxDZ8 17:09, 26 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Last edits are really interesting! Thank you! MaxDZ8 20:34, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

More comments

I think the claims of this article ought to be toned down. Conceptually stream processing is somewhat similiar to vector processing. Some of the Imagine folks are at a startup company named Stream Processors Inc. trying to build (you guessed it!), a commercially viable stream processor. Dyl 08:11, 28 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you, maybe I've exagerated the thing a bit. Although it's really a branch of vector processing, I believe there are some differences - but I'm not really used to supercomputers and stuff. MaxDZ8 15:51, 28 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]