speculative computing
Update 2008: The most important thing to emerge from SpecLab, in my opinion, was the
NINES project, for which I designed
Collex.
Background: I was a founding member of UVA's
Speculative Computing Laboratory (or SpecLab), an interdisciplinary group supporting exploratory research in digital humanities. We use the technical term "speculative computing" metaphorically:
Speculative computing is a technique to improve the execution time of certain applications by starting some computations before it is known that the computations are required. A speculative computation will eventually become mandatory or irrelevant. In the absence of side effects irrelevant computations may be aborted. However, a computation which is irrelevant for the value it produces may still be relevant for the side effects it performs.
(from the proceedings of the 1992 Parallel Symbolic Computing Workshop at MIT)
"Speculative Computing" is also the title of my
dissertation. My efforts and projects along these lines include: