A computing platform

A friend of mine came up with the idea to build a new computing environment, one that would do the things right, we felt other environments did wrong. We have been discussing this openly with other people as well, and therefore the number of things we find is wrong in existing tools is large, and I am just going to mention a few key issues here:

• We need a good front-end language (the language the end-user uses), with no unnecessary historical luggage (odd or ugly syntax due to back-compatibility concerns). Personally I find Fortran to be an excellent example of truly ugly syntax (consider the indentation requirements for example - why would anyone want that in a language ?).
• The computing ``engine'', the backend, must be efficient enough, so that real production code can be run on this system with acceptable performance (this is what MatLab does wrong).
• Because we think cluster computing is going to be widely used, and because we hate to parallelize code manually, the computing environment should also be able to automatically parallelize and distribute computations on a cluster of machines. The C programming language is especially hard to parallelize automatically, due to the freedom it gives the programmer to reference memory as she pleases. This is an unnecessary freedom in numerical computing (it's great if you write operating system kernels, but we don't care about that in a numerical computing language).
• The software must be open source^1.1. This is necessary if we ever want to build anything that can compete with existing tools. We cannot build a replacement for MatLab, RLab, and the others, if we keep the development process closed and the code a secret.

After having decided upon these goals, we found that the project and the various sub-projects needed a name.

The name of the computing environment as a whole, became TONS. In the beginning it was short for ``Toolkit for Open Numerics''. Later we changed it to be ``Tons of Numerics''. Note that the latter is a recursive acronym, I think that was the main reason for the change. However that story is not all that important for the project.

The front-end language has been dubbed TAL, for TONS Algorithmic Language. But since this language still only exists in our minds and not in the form of real code, I will not discuss this language any further here.

This project touches aspects of several of the goals mentioned above. An efficient virtual machine was developed, and it currently has the capability to automatically parallelize and distribute code to a cluster of machines, with some restrictions and limitations of course.

The TONS system today, consists only of the code that I have written in order to examine the possibilities to perform automatic parallelization and distribution of calculations. Therefore, when I refer to the TONS project in any of the following, I refer to the code that I wrote for this project and this report.