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from the lets-MILK-it-for-all-it-is-worth dept.
In today's computer chips, memory management is based on what computer scientists call the principle of locality: If a program needs a chunk of data stored at some memory location, it probably needs the neighboring chunks as well. But that assumption breaks down in the age of big data, now that computer programs more frequently act on just a few data items scattered arbitrarily across huge data sets. Since fetching data from their main memory banks is the major performance bottleneck in today's chips, having to fetch it more frequently can dramatically slow program execution.
This week, at the International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are presenting a new programming language, called Milk, that lets application developers manage memory more efficiently in programs that deal with scattered data points in large data sets. In tests on several common algorithms, programs written in the new language were four times as fast as those written in existing languages. But the researchers believe that further work will yield even larger gains.
http://phys.org/news/2016-09-language-fourfold-speedups-problems-common.html
[Source]: Faster parallel computing
(Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:26AM
Thanks for the link. Just the abstract already clarifies a lot. Here is the key sentence:
"In this paper, we introduce milk — a C/C++ language extension that allows programmers to annotate memorybound loops concisely."
So it's not only not a programming language, it's just something that allows the programmer to give the compiler hints. Hints that the compiler then uses to optimize memory access, especially in the case of parallelism. "Milk" is also the name of their prototype compiler that processes these hints.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.