Comments on: Parallel programming isn’t ever going to be easy

By: dave

dave — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:46:12 +0000

I’m not a programmer or much of a mathematician, but I love reading about this stuff anyway.

By: Terry Stratoudakis

Terry Stratoudakis — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:45:50 +0000

LabVIEW has been parallel since its inception in 1986, multi-threaded since 1999, and multi-core now. See: http://www.ni.com/multicore/

By: John Leidel

John Leidel — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:38:02 +0000

I would have to agree with Damien. At the end of the day, we really need to converge as an industry and first decide what the real problems are. I believe there are plenty of individuals who understand how to construct parallel algorithms, with a lack of tools to do so. Why are we constantly re-writing SCALAPACK routines for new applications?

There is certainly a light at the end of the tunnel. I see glimmers of great things to come in several infant language [extensions].

By: Amir

Amir — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:55:31 +0000

That list doesn’t include Excel. It’s hard to see the forest.

By: Damien

Damien — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:19:06 +0000

The parallelism crisis looks to me a lot like the evolution of object-oriented architecture and design in the 90′s and early 00′s. A really useful new toolbox arrived and we didn’t know how to use it. So we wrote the same functional programs with really deep inheritance and took a few steps backwards. Then a few people who really got software architecture, O-O and compilers started to lead by example, and we built the necessary critical mass of O-O skills.

The same will happen with parallelism. We’re at the 1992 C++ equivalent of “Oooh, look, virtual functions and inheritance, that’s cool” stage of parallelism. We’re not going to crack parallelism wide open until we have that critical mass of brains on it.