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> Any idea how fast a single channel could get with optical transport and photon-detecting transistors?

Terabits per second per channel would be possible but it would require to much high energy SerDes (serializer-deserialiser) circuits. It will be more energy efficient to have more parallel optical channels (bundled) switching at the low power optimal speed of the transistors, around 1-2 Ghz instead.

>I wonder what the parallelisation ceiling will be? How much parallelization is required?

There is no ceiling, no limit, for example look at an "existence proof": there are around a hundred trillion cells in your body that perform billions of computations chemically and also with DNA processing by ribosomes in parallel. No limit. Those 8 billion bodies theoretically could learn to work together with the aid of internet and personal computers. There are 10^24 stars in the universe.

Your thinking, your imagination, your thinking brain modelling of parallel systems is the ceiling, the limit. But you can learn, experiment and improve over time so your limits on thinking up better ways to parallelise computation will improve. Humanity could dedicate itself to the open ended creation of knowledge (of knowing how to compute in parallel with photons without limits) [1].

Right now our computation limits are limited by our knowledge (of manufacturing at atom scales), the energy output of the sun and the amount of atoms in the solar system we could rearrange [4]. We should fund our scientists to create the knowledge we need to enlarge the limits [5]. I hope you'll fund me as well :-)

> Elixir development

Smalltalk, LISP, Erlang, Elixer, Actor Language are some of the best message passing programming languages for massively scaling parallelism.

Alan Kay [2][3] has great lectures to get you started in thinking better (including about (computational) parallelism, scaling and message passing). A few others have written some papers as well (see links in my HN comments the last 12 weeks). I can teach you a bit too, write to morphle73 at gmail dot com.

[1] Chemical scum that dream of distant quasars https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_chemical_scum_that_d...

[2] Alan Kay lecture: putting Turing to work https://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/video/lecture-putt...

[3] Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY&t=2557s

[4] https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/hardware/1999-bradbury-matr...

[5] https://internetat50.com/references/Kay_How.pdf




Thank you! Minor clarification, for performance ceiling I was wondering about for serial (not parallel)


The sequential process performance ceiling will be set by physical limits. Photons at high frequenties have too much energy, for example gamma rays.

The practical ceiling will be set by manufacturing limitations for the next few decades: can we build structures atom by atom? [1]

[1] Richard Feynman "Tiny Machines" Nanotechnology Lecture - aka "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c&t=1390s




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