Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

History repeats itself as the computer can be fully occupied by the efforts of just a few programmers.

There was a time in computing history when there were few programmers. The computers weren’t powerful. A couple of programmers could keep a big computer busy all the time. Then the computers became more powerful. More programmers were needed to keep them busy.

Then the computers became much more powerful, much less expensive, and much smaller. Every person could have their own personal computer. We needed hundreds of millions of programmers to keep all these personal computers busy.

Now we are sort of back to the beginning where the number of programmers needed has shrunk to an alarming level. What happened? I think the really smart programmers put the rest of the programmers into the unemployment line.

A few really smart programmers figured out how to tie a bunch of computers together so they looked like one computer. The Beowolf cluster was one instance of this. There are many others. People let someone else use the CPU cycles of their home computer at night, etc. This sort of falls under Distributed Computing.

Then came the datacenter. I don’t know how many individual computers there are in a datacenter. Probably a million or so. Once you reach a number like that, who knows?

Then some really smart programmer figured out how to run one big program on a million processors in a datacenter. One datacenter—one programmer. One solution to solve all the world’s problems. Well, sort of, but that is a detail.

So we are back to a computer needing only a couple of programmers. Except today, that computer is an entire building full of a million computers. Used to be an entire building filled by one computer. One? A million? what’s the difference (a few zeros).

What’s next? Not sure, but it could be fascinating.