Free eBook: The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?

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The SoftTalk blog points us to this free eBook, The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?.

Chapter 4 is entitled ‘The end of programming as we know it’. It notes: “The developers of the applications and programming systems have made much progress in providing appropriate abstractions, but not enough in that most developers and programming systems currently use the sequential model.” The chapter goes on to discuss the software implications of parallelism; the importance of managing memory latency; and the need for simple software abstractions and hardware mechanisms for parallel programming. It then goes into the state of the art in parallel programming, covering thread programming for shared memory, message passing interface, MapReduce, and distributed computing (with examples including the Seti@Home project where users donate spare computing cycles to search for alien life, and the less noble example of botnets).

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