I attended the IEEE E-Commerce conference in San Franscisco. The conference is known as CEC06/EEE06 and some other acronyms. It was a very interesting academic oriented event with a few hundred people from all over the world, I made some good contacts and learned some new stuff.
My own paper was about how I built a large scale simulation of a peer to peer network using a very efficient architecture based on the Occam language. I used to write a lot of Occam about 20 years ago, and it seemed appropriate to the problem I wanted to solve. I think most people are baffled by the language, but I like it. Unlike most recent languages where everything is an object with types and methods, in Occam everything is a process with protocols and messages. The other difference is that Occam was designed to run fast on a 10MHz CPU and on todays CPUs it is extremely fast and small compared to recent languages like Java.
What I found at the conference was that most of the simulation frameworks people were using were run overnight to generate results. My own example simulation of 1000 nodes ran for about three seconds to produce an interesting result.
The full paper can be obtained from http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/CEC-EEE.2006.81
This is the official URL, and IEEE charges non-members for downloads.
technorati tags:IEEE, Occam, simulation
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