Help Wanted

Programmers only: Don Knuth, you may know, has been for some time writing Volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming. This, he says, should be available in 2007 with Volume 5 following in 2010; in the meantime you should own the first three volumes. Much has been written on Knuth, such as this 1999 piece in Salon.

For the new volumes, Knuth decided to retire the hypothetical MIX computer used for programming examples in vols 1-3, in favor of a brand new, modern (but still hypothetical) RISC processor he calls MMIX. This change motivates a significant porting project:

All of the MIX programs in Volumes 1--3 will need to be rewritten in MMIX, before I finish the ``ultimate'' edition of those volumes that I plan to write after Volume 5 is completed. The current target date for the ultimate volumes is the year 2011, so there is plenty of time to do the conversion. But I think it will be an instructive undertaking if different groups of students from around the world try to do the necessary translations first, perhaps in friendly competitions, long before I get into the act.

If you want the job, you'd better hurry-up — lots of the positions have been taken. Apply at MMIXMasters.

If recoding algorithms from one machine language to another doesn't interest you, perhaps you'd be interested in:

...a level-50 exercise that asks a highly motivated reader to ``Write a book about operating systems, which includes a complete design of an NNIX kernel for the MMIX architecture.''

Ken Thompson, call your office.

Happy Anniversary!

Recondite is one month old today. In that time we've amassed a readership numbering in the ten's of people; people who, mind you, have shown themselves to be among the most sophisticated and well-informed of all the digerati. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Instant Immortality

I've come up with an aphorism that captures my feeling about where the effort in building secure systems needs to go. Echoing the old saying about the importance of tactics versus logistics in military studies I say:

Amateurs study cryptography; professionals study economics.

The Tokens on the Bus Go Round and Round

Well, I said yesterday I was going to say more about Dataflow computing and how that has lead to new features in modern microprocessors. Turns out, someone has written a paper on the topic.

So for the third^* in our series of Heros of Computer Architecture trading cards, we include the name of Jack Dennis, the originator of the Dataflow concept.

[*] The first two in the series being Burton Smith and Arvind. Collect them all!

Arvind, call your office

Computer Architecture Department: I was planning a blog entry which could have been called Sun's Throughput Computing is Warmed-over Intel Hyper-Threading Which is a an Uncredited Ripoff of the Denelcor HEP. But I couldn't think of a title. Well, I could, but it would be Shame On You, Sun Microsystems, If That's the Best You Can Come Up With.

In researching that topic I found a more interesting instance of the wheel of reincarnation. Dataflow architecture is back, at least at the University of Washington's Wavescalar project. More tomorrow. Meanwhile, you can look at home page of the Annette of Computer Architecture.