On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 6:44 AM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>wrote:

> > At the hardware level we do have message passing between a
> > processor and the memory controller -- this is exactly the
> > same as talking to a shared server and has the same issues of
> > scaling etc. If you have very few clients, a single shared
> > server is indeed a cost effective solution.
>
> just to repeat myself in a context that hopefully makes things
> clearer:  sometimes we don't admit it's a network.  and that's
> not always a bad thing.
>
> - erik
>
> Yes, we abstract things so it doesn't look like it is... so we can have a
programming model where we don't have to care about keeping all the
distributed bits in sync.
However, I get the feeling that those abstractions, at any level, suffer
from the same weaknesses.   Well I think that's why certain RISC instruction
sets have instructions like eieio  anyway :-)

Dave