Why Big Data is Really Big Parallelism

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Robin Bloor

Robin Bloor

Over at Inside Analysis, Robin Bloor writes that the move to parallelism was the motive force for Big Data.

Moore’s Law got deflected in 2004, when it became no longer practical to ramp up the clock speed of CPUs to improve performance. So the chip industry improved CPU performance by adding more processors to a chip in concert with miniaturization. This was extra power, but you could not leverage it easily without building parallel software. Virtual machines could use multicore chips for server consolidation of light workloads, but large workloads needed parallel architectures to exploit the power. So, the software industry and the hardware industry moved towards exploiting parallelism in ways they had not previously done. This is the motive force behind the Big Data.

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