Design and Implementation of a 256-Core BrainFuck Computer [pdf]

http://people.csail.mit.edu/wjun/papers/sigtbd16.pdf

by Katydid • 10 years ago

125 104 10 years ago

people.csail.mit.edu

rys• 10 years ago

"The BrainFuck computer is an attractive solution for servicing high throughput BrainFuck cloud services, both in terms of performance and cost."

Love it.

Cyph0n6• 10 years ago

Don't laugh: this is the next big step in cloud computing infrastructure. Imagine Linux compiled to the BrainFuck ISA running a Docker container running a BrainFuck web application. Of course, we will clearly need a solid BrainFuck-to-JS transpiler to make things web scale.

Could it get better than that?

Retr0spectrum• 10 years ago

Here's a very performant BF-to-JS transpiler:

http://copy.sh/brainfuck/

We're ready for the revolution!

sjnair96• 10 years ago

I don't understand what's amusing. Care to explain?

Cyph0n6• 10 years ago

Have you heard of anyone running BrainFuck in production?

subleq• 10 years ago

The instruction encoding seems inefficient -- they don't use the full 4 bits of information (the first bit is always zero except for `.`). Why not use a 3-bit encoding, since there are 8 instructions?

Xorlev• 10 years ago

They have 9 states including a stop instruction, b`1111 which would preclude a 3-bit encoding. In any case, I suspect it's much easier to handle 4-bit words.

trevyn• 10 years ago

I suspect it's much easier to handle 4-bit words.

I therefore suspect a 3-bit encoding would be more in the spirit of BrainFuck. :)

rzzzt• 10 years ago

2 ternary digits should suffice, then.

flamedoge2• 10 years ago

Why does it have to stop?

rasur• 10 years ago

LOL. I work in the same building as Urban. I'll be sure to point it out to him on Monday, I'm sure he'll be amused (or annoyed at my position in the queue of people that have already informed him of this). :D

digi_owl4• 10 years ago

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

bbcbasic• 10 years ago

Whiskey tango bravo foxtrot

r-w2• 10 years ago

Foxtrot Tango Whiskey.

NormlOverrated• 10 years ago

Available on AWS in 2017.

nickpsecurity25• 10 years ago

The SystemD execution and update engine.

qwertyuiop92421• 10 years ago

I mean, it would be more secure than the current one. But that's not saying much.

Fun fact: systemd now has an entire command devoted to setting locale, something tyically done through simple text files.

Lennart, just stop writing executables that do almost nothing. Despite what you may thing, we don't all have infinite disk space.

toast0• 10 years ago

Just fyi, if you put this on your resume, you might want to omit or abbreviate the name of the language.

xvedejas• 10 years ago

Why? "Fuck" is not as bad a word as it used to be, especially depending on context.

veddox• 10 years ago

And your surrounding culture. In some places, you'd be out the door before the word had fully left your mouth. In others, nobody would blink...

quickben• 10 years ago

I wouldn't count on that. You generally want to stay away from any expletives in interviews, work and anything career oriented.

__s• 10 years ago

As someone who lists Befunge on their resume, either they get it or they don't

(I followed up an interview with a link to a brainfuck interpreter I did in Haskell https://github.com/serprex/bfhs I got a 2nd interview, but no offer)

daveguy• 10 years ago

Personally I think the author is celebrating a recent successful tenure defense.

chris_va• 10 years ago

I'm impressed that they were able to find 24 references to cite.

posterboy4• 10 years ago

despite the juvenile name bf is quite mature for what it is

Someone• 10 years ago

Why is the author consistently mixing up " "instructions per cycle" with "instructions per second"?

Surely, phrases such as "We observed the following Instructions per Second (IPC)" and "assuming a perfect 1 instruction per second on the general purpose processor" should have activated some neurons in some brain, even assuming it got distorted by doing this research?

sitkack2• 10 years ago

Maybe working on a 256 core BF computer has BF'd his brain? Have some empathy.

nickpsecurity25• 10 years ago

That's my guess. It's one of the few projects that I thought actually would damage my brain. I avoided it. Unlambda language is another one like that. Although I have considered trying to implement that one, esp in hardware.

troels• 10 years ago

Depending on the clock speed, it may be accurate enough?

jsjohnst2• 10 years ago

This greatly annoyed me too. It's IPC not IPS after all. I'm surprised this didn't get caught by literally anyone who reviewed this paper before hitting submit.

nickpsecurity25• 10 years ago

This is some bullshit. They didnt even port the standard benchmarks to Brainfuck to compare performance against reference implementations. I want to see ZIP, raytracing, web servers, map reduce... actual apps with associated BrainFuck performance. Scratch the whole Future Work section in favor of that given you might accidentally find evidence for using it in production somewhere.

Moore and your GreenArray chips: be afraid! Something even more incomprehensible is coming after your market share!

sitkack2• 10 years ago

ColorBrainFuck would be in shades of gray.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 10 years ago

I wonder if you're joking, but these sorts of things have been implemented in Brainfuck.

nickpsecurity25• 10 years ago

I wasn't. I'm simply too sane to follow BrainFuck developments unless it's something wild and accidentally useful like a 256-core CPU on HN front page. ;) If they've been implemented, authors should've run some of them on the processor to include benchmarks in the paper. It's standard thing to do in CompSci papers on CPU's, compilers, optimizations, interpreters, anything. They usually include something like that.

qume• 10 years ago

". A large amount of research is focusing on what kind of wimpy machines are best fit for important workloads. In this paper, we present a rather extreme example of a wimpy processor, using the BrainFuck [22] esoteric programming language as its ISA."

Seems legitimate to me. Seriously, why not explore the extremes? Thats where we often learn the most.

I suspect many here think this is a joke, but although does have it's funny side this definitely warrants the research IMHO

djhworld• 10 years ago

The title of the paper made me laugh a lot.

Reading through it, you can tell the author had written it with a knowing smile

qwertyuiop92421• 10 years ago

Well, this is a SigTBD paper (http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu). I would expect nothing less.

qwertyuiop92421• 10 years ago

Ah. MIT, never change. Mind, this kind of stuff could come out of other institutions as well. They shouldn't change either.

Anyways, can we have a version of TIS-100 where you write brainfuck with added message sending primitives instead of the TIS-100 asm? Of course, each BF interpreter would be working with only, say, 2 or 3 cells of RAM.

I want to see either that, or a TIS-100 asm compiler for GreenArray chips. Or both.

flamedoge2• 10 years ago

"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should"

gene-h• 10 years ago

"Just because we shouldn't doesn't mean we won't"

faragon• 10 years ago

After Intel adding deep-learning instructions to its processors, I guess they could add BrainFuck extensions to the x86 ISA, too.

posterboy4• 10 years ago

All 6 BF commands have x86 opcode counterparts, already. Don't quote me, I'm guessing.

userbinator• 10 years ago

Not quite, but an interpreter can be written in less than 100 bytes of x86 instructions:

http://www.hugi.scene.org/compo/compoold.htm#compo6

noipv4• 10 years ago

SCIGen has come a long way to producing a really realistic paper along with the hardware implementation ;) https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/

r-w2• 10 years ago

Not sure whether Iota, Jot, and lambda calculus can be executed instruction-by-instruction, but generally speaking, wouldn’t a Turing-complete language with just two instructions allow for even greater throughput than BrainFuck does?

rosalinekarr• 10 years ago

Why two? Why not just one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer

jsjohnst2• 10 years ago

It's been done...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12372242

haalcion3• 10 years ago

Is this the most the word "fuck" has appeared in a technical paper? It looks like it.

posterboy4• 10 years ago

The [RSSB] Single Instruction Architecture is interesting for a simple processor implementation as well. [Calfee] mentions a relation to "biological mechanical computer", i.e. neural like.

[RSSB] https://esolangs.org/wiki/RSSB

[Calfee] https://github.com/nospamcalfee/RSSB