Deadlines are great because without them I might never finish anything. The down-side, however, is that the deadline sometimes appears before me (like I’d never seen it before in my life!) at a point when I’d like to go in a new direction with something I’m looking at or even start all over again, using the lessons of my first attempt. Instead, you have to either say you won’t meet the deadline or neatly wrap up the work to date into a presentable result.
That’s what happened with the new Parallel Execution paper I’ve put together for the Hotsos Symposium 2006. I’m happy that it does what it does reasonably successfully; most of what I intended at the outset; and I did make the deadline (just about); but I still have other ideas rattling around in my head. I made a decision to go with what I had but I’ve decided to carry on working on it and looking at other areas. It’s a work in progress.
Bearing that in mind (and the fact that it’s on the Hotsos Symposium 2006 portal for registered users) I’ve decided to stick the current version on the web for those that are interested, but I can almost guarantee that there’ll be a second version so you might prefer to wait for that. It’s quite long but a lot of that is scripts and graphs so it’s not quite the daunting read that it appears.
There won�t be any changes in the paper before Hotsos but, as I’m still playing around with other ideas, any new thoughts and discoveries will go into the presentation at the Symposium. Feel free to comment or drop me a mail if you think there’s anything I’ve got wrong, you disagree with or you have ideas for other areas to investigate.
I’m really looking forward to the event now that I made the deadline. There’s a lot on the schedule. I’m looking forward to although it looks like I’m going to miss one of Jonathan’s presentations!