IBM's Chief Architect Says Software is at Dead End

j2xs writes "In an InformationWeek article entitled 'Where's the Software to Catch Up to Multicore Computing?' the Chief Architect at IBM gives some fairly compelling reasons why your favorite software will soon be rendered deadly slow because of new hardware architectures. Software, she says, just doesn't understand how to do work in parallel to take advantage of 16, 64, 128 cores on new processors. Intel just stated in an SD Times article that 100% of its server processors will be multicore by end of 2007. We will never, ever return to single processor computers. Architect Catherine Crawford goes on to discuss some of the ways developers can harness the 'tiny supercomputers' we'll all have soon, and some of the applications we can apply this brute force to."

Comments

You hit the nail right on the head

[Salvance]

The argument that software will get slower assumes that most consumer software will continue to have additional CPU requirements without being coded for multi-core applications. This doesn't make sense. The average consumer uses an Office product, e-mail, and a browser. None of these use anywhere close to 100% of the CPU for very long even on a Pentium 3, let alone on a 2GHz+ core in a multi-core processor.

Workstation computing will suffer some until software vendors catch up, but this is already happening (e.g. most CAD, Animation, Video Processing are starting to come out with multi-core optimized software). Sure, some apps will continue to be single-threaded, but eventually, who would buy them? Software vendors aren't dumb.

Games will probably speed up significantly as well. Imagine the possibilities of having a game engine where each AI character utilizes 100% of a single core? Game designers aren't going to sit around desiging games that run on single core engines, they always push the boundaries and will continue to do so.

Re:You hit the nail right on the head

[Pxtl]

Even worst-case-scenario, minimally-threaded workstation software can still allow for manual multitasking - if the render-loop of your 3D-modelling app is only using a small amount of the available processor, then at least the others remain available for continuing to work in the main app.

The real problem is that procedural languages are fugly for working in on this stuff. Even the "modern" commercial languages like Java/DotNet still are somewhat cumbersome in the world of threading, compared to other languages where the threading metaphors are deeper in teh logic (or more mutable languages, like Lisp, where creating new core metaphors is trivial).

Stephen Wolfram has a solution

[maynard]

A New Kind of Science. Converting a range of standard CS algorithms into Cellular Automata networks is the very solution our brains use; a combination of message passing and feedback loops. If we want our computers to scale in parallel, we might want to look at how biology has solved the problem. A lot of people laughed at Wolfram when he initially published that book. I think he yet might have the last laugh.

Re:Can't the OS just bump apps to their own procs?

[Overzeetop]

You are correct. And given the multitude of things that modern OSes need to do to "help us", we need these cores. I wish my laptop could be upgraded to a multi-core system, as there are too many things that will bod down the system that have to run in the background. Having a processor (or two) for them would significantly increase the responsiveness of my system.

A decade ago I had a dual PP200 that was one of the nicest machines I had ever run. I ran some unruly apps at the time, and having an extra idle processor to cut those processes of at the knee without rebooting was a nice benefit. Nothing was multi-threaded back then, but having two processors was still valuable.