by Todd Hoff
The fecundity of the Java ecosystem can most readily be seen with the efforts to tame our multi-core future. There’s a multi-core crisis going in case you haven’t heard. It’s all you’ll hear mentioned in the halls of the Pentagon. The CPU wizards have maxed out on clock speed and the only way we can scale is by adding more cores. And we don’t know how to do that. At 100 cores common ways of doing things break down. Locks don’t scale. Cache contention for shared memory slows us down. Bandwidth on the bus is limited. TLB for managing more memory is in short supply. And we need more high speed network cards to handle faster CPUs.
And that’s just at the hardware level. It’s worse for programmers. Locking is just a nightmare. I didn’t believe that at first. Early in my career I worked on several multi-core systems. I thought everything was cool. Be careful and it will all work out. But work with a group and it all goes to hell. People add functions, locks, take too much time. Problems like deadlock, priority inversion, and high latency all kill a system.
What can we do?
