WWDC -- Reporting from the streets of San Francisco

Dave Field hits up some Worldwide Developers' Conference attendees for their view of the show and the future of computing.

So it turns out that Apple is being Apple, and not letting media into the actual sessions at WWDC. All that I was allowed access to was His Steveness’ keynote -- which is a problem because I touched down in San Francisco about half way through the week, and His Steveness had addressed the commoners already.

But who cares? He only revealed a small amount of guessable information; mostly that there’s a 3G iPhone and it’s finally shipping to Australia. This is awesome, but it’s not exactly a meaty, hardcore topic to report on.

In situations like this, the best thing to do is to go out and see San Francisco, then head back to the Moscone Centre a few minutes before lunch finishes and the next round of sessions begin. You look for somebody wearing a lanyard and ask “So what did I miss at WWDC?” and talk with the developers that were in the sessions.

So you have been warned: what you are about to read comes from second hand sources, and is technically 'hearsay'.

People seem worried about the transition to massively parallel computing, including but not limited to the hundreds of cores that GPGPU will bring in. Apparently it’s already happening in limited doses within the Mac world, and all you need to do is trace where your calculations are going and see some of them hit the video card instead of the processor.

The language needed to do this was described to me as some amalgamation of Open GL and Ct (Intel’s automatic multithreaded C programming language) that as of yet, apparently, has no standards laid down or a working group to define them. From the sounds of the OS X 10.6 page, it seems to be called Open CL. This means that it’s going to be many years before we see maximum efficiency and a complete about-face in the way we think of computing.

An attendee I chatted to was perplexed that nobody in the conference asked a question that I hit him with: where are these new parallel programmers going to come from? Will there be an overlap between the original serial programmers and the new generation of coders being trained at university, or will the old school programmers need to learn a new skill set?

Or in the most interesting scenario, will the new generation of programmers need to delve into legacy code and rewrite existing software from the ground up to take advantage of properly multithreaded computing?

Either way, we’re heading toward a new wave of computing. One attendee I talked to said that his multi-million dollar server gear could be replaced with a single rack if only somebody knew how to program a few video cards properly.

The take-home lesson is that if anybody you know is planning to do a Computer Science course and asks you for advice, tell them to seriously consider parallel computing and core algorithms.

Anyhoo, I am drunk (you lush -ed) on the locally brewed Racer 5. Budweiser may be vaguely alcoholic soda water, but some American beers are worth their hops.