Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!

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Do you think you know Parallel Programming? Think again. IBM’s David Unger is planning a thought-provoking talk entitled Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future at the upcoming Splash conference, October 22, in Portland.

In the end of the first decade of the new century, chips such as Tilera’s can give us a glimpse of a future in which manycore microprocessors will become commonplace: every (non-hand-held) computer’s CPU chip will contain 1,000 fairly homogeneous cores. Such a system will not be programmed like the cloud, or even a cluster because communication will be much faster relative to computation. Nor will it be programmed like today’s multicore processors because the illusion of instant memory coherency will have been dispelled by both the physical limitations imposed by the 1,000-way fan-in to the memory system, and the comparatively long physical lengths of the inter- vs. intra-core connections. In the 1980’s we changed our model of computation from static to dynamic, and when this future arrives we will have to change our model of computation yet again.

SPLASH stands for Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity. SPLASH is an annual conference that embraces all aspects of software construction and delivery, and that joins all factions of programming technologies. Read the Full Story.

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  1. […] who is a researcher at IBM, is speaking at the SPLASH conference in Portland, Ore. in October. In a tantalizing summary of his talk he explains […]