So, Jonah is moving and he asked me to write a guest post. Jonah’s recent articles about computing prompted me to write about distributed computing. The question I will answer is: how do you go from computing with a sequential program to computing on many core machines (aka Parallel Computation)? Parallel Computation First of all, what is parallel computation? In a nutshell, parallel computation is the science which allows you to use a many processors to compute faster. You certainly would want to do this if you worked on the stock market where the faster you are at calculating
July 2014
Uncategorized
Moving (again)
For (hopefully) the last time in the next three years, I’m moving! It’s only one city over, but I want to try and keep up a semblance of work productivity while I pack up and hop. So for the next two weeks or so, the blog will be on hiatus. Sorry all! I will try to put up some fun content sporadically. And hopefully a guest post.
Electronics / Physics / Science And Math
Flip-Flops and the Art of Computer Memory
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. ~The White Queen to Alice (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass) This is the fifth part in my multi-part series on how computers work. Computers are thinking machines, and the first four parts of my series have been on how we teach computers to think. But all of this logic, electronic or otherwise, is useless unless our computers can remember what they did. After logicking something out, a computer needs to remember the result of all that logicking! In this post, I describe how to use the logic gates