Also a great way of visualizing some basic problem with concurrency.
Gridlock is excellent demonstrated as above, if you are putting things in a queue for a thread that is taking forever to run, the producer thread will eventually (hopefully) be blocked due to memory issues, thus passing the slow down further up the chain. Much like a road, and exactly like the visual effect seen here.
I like how dynamics of complex systems are getting so captivating and easy to understand by visually simplified simulations rather than mathematical expressions.
The human mind somehow grasps these dynamic, subconsciously creates an in-brain simulation and you can predict what will happen when you play with the parameters on the computer simulation. It just feels so natural.
So fun. For kicks, I just spent more than a few minutes trying to find a semi-steady equilibrium where, say 80% to 90% of cars are temporally stalled without pushing the system into total gridlock.
Just now, I got it down to only one car moving for about a quarter of the circle. Then you really have to pay attention to which car is going where. :)
Has anyone had an experience of "gridlock" in a distributed system? Where bottlenecks cascade due to failover, etc?
This is a great visualization that is relevant to my coursework. Thank you.
Glad everyone liked it. Going to make one about why buses bunch up in the future.
what tools are used for dynamic graphs in this visualization? is it google visualization api?
This is just an excellent visualization to explain a concept that is hard to imagine.
Lots of difficult concepts are actually very simple once you boil them down to the fundamentals and visualize them.
This has big implications for education. Many concepts like derivatives in finance, algorithmns in computer science are suprisingly simple.
I remember a visualization for Paxos (a distributed consensus algorithmn) which basically have an actor to represent each node in the network. That was the moment I finally "got it".
It is a shame that educators are still so backwards at how they communicate concepts to students. and how ineffective that is. I think it comes down to the fact that professors in universities have to play dual role of being a researcher + to teach. And since they are recognized for publishing papers and not so much for making helpful visualzations to explain concepts to first year students. Education part is neglected.