11 Jan
2017
11 Jan
'17
8:33 a.m.
Not so long ago I joked about putting a Cray-1 in a watch. Now that we are
essentially living in the future, what audacious (but realistic)
architectures can we imagine under our desks in 25 years? Perhaps a mesh
of ten-million of today's highest end CPU/GPU pairs bathing in a vast sea
of non-volatile memory? What new abstractions are needed in the OS to
handle that? Obviously many of the current command line tools would need
rethinking (ps -ef for instance.)
Or does the idea of a single OS disintegrate into a fractal cloud of
zero-cost VM's? What would a meta-OS need to manage that? Would we still
recognize it as a Unix?