Using a higher-level language can also help with many other things, for example integrated garbage collection, built-in serialization and process migration, intelligent message passing (pass objects around rather than bytes), etc.
A good example of an implementation of these ideas is Singularity (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/), which is written in a superset of C#.
Compiled, concurrent, and memory-safe, with no global GC.
(Full disclosure: I work on Rust.)
Cyclone would be another candidate: http://cyclone.thelanguage.org/
Cilk would be another interesting option, with its built-in support for concurrency: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-cilk-plus/
In all seriousness, when you have to support hardware controllers whose only interface to the CPU is a memory block or I/O instructions, what other choice do you have besides C? I guess you have C++...
It feels to me that is the next iteration of refinements of technology that is 40 - 50 years old. Caches are what, from 1970? Interconnect issues date from the same time. I think machine cycles are in abundance, the scarce resource is interconnections for data flow. So one of the first things you want to do is organize your data flow so that processing is local. Think simulations like vision processing, weather prediction, rendering, where a processor can work locally and pass on a reduced amount information to its neighbors. The interesting problems arise when the results have to be delivered non-locally. If you store them in main memory for the recipient to pick them up, you run into bandwidth problems.
So what I see as needed is gazillions of low level worker bees with modest bandwidth requirements that have semi-permanent connections to the consumers of their output. Think the human brain, Google search, image rendering.
Apologies for the rambling, lack of citations, etc. etc, but I am interested in HNer's views on these issues.
However I agree that it'll likely produce interesting research advances and usable components, and some up-front overselling is probably unavoidable... saying something like, "we're initiating a collection of research projects to produce technologies that will be needed for a future generation of operating systems" isn't as good PR as saying, "we're building the next-gen operating system".
The ideas failed in a relative fashion. They failed to yield that many result relative relative to the effort and resources that were put into them. And they especially failed to yield as many results as you could get by just increasing raw clock speed. And their cost was not just their raw complexity but the training required for programmer to understand parallelism (the low cost of today's "entry level" programmer is a huge bogus to the IT industry. If companies had to spend a year on system-specific training, the cost would be vast).
But given that such projects were only failures relative to the alternative of just coming up with a simple architecture with a higher clock speed, if the alternative is going away, there's no reason they can't become relative successes. Watson was a relative success - if you could have Watson-level processing-power on a single chip programmable with Ruby, the effort IBM put into the project would look silly. But since it looks you can't, Watson seems like a productive use of resources.
In a lot of ways, the last thirty years have involved substituting low-cost, high-power chips for high-price, high-skill programmers yielding a huge, de-skilled programming workforce. The end of Moore's-law-for-speed would seem to mean things will move differently in the future.
I won't address the particular architecture points you make, which all sound good but are unrelated to the general of previous parallelism efforts "failing".
http://www.tilera.com/about_tilera/press-releases/linux-appl...
( June 2009, Erlang (BEAM) on Tilera 64-core )
That's exactly what Microsoft Azure claims to be in their marketing literature.
(I think it's wise to pay attention to how such forces change language.)
For the criticism that the project will "fail", I think there's some merit. Will this produce the next computation system that the world uses? Probably not. Will this push the boundaries of engineering and improve on the state of the art? Almost certainly. And due to its scale, and the fact that Angstrom was created by combining multiple separate projects, there's also room for individual projects or ideas to succeed even if others don't.
My background is that I worked on the FOS project, which is the part that is most related to the title of this post. If you were looking for more technical meat, I encourage you to check out the project page: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/carbon/?page_id=39
