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Choice Overload In Parallel Programming

Posted by kdawson on from the too-much-jam dept.

scott3778 writes to recommend a post by Timothy Mattson over at Intel's Research Blog. He argues, convincingly, that the most important paper for programming language designers to read today is one written by two social psychology professors in 2000. This is the well-known academic study, "When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire too Much of a Good Thing?" "And then we show them the parallel programming environments they can work with: MPI, OpenMP, Ct, HPF, TBB, Erlang, Shmemm, Portals, ZPL, BSP, CHARM++, Cilk, Co-array Fortran, PVM, Pthreads, windows threads, Tstreams, GA, Java, UPC, Titanium, Parlog, NESL,Split-C... and the list goes on and on. If we aren't careful, the result could very well be a 'choice overload' experience with software vendors running away in frustration."

13 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Fortran by confused+one · · Score: 3, Funny

    Because I'm sick (in the head) I say we go with the Fortran option!

    'twas my second language; after BASIC. Ahhh, the fond memories...

    1. Re:Fortran by AuMatar · · Score: 2, Funny

      Dear god, the mind damage from Fortran don't just effect your logic skills, they effect your language centers as well! You can't even remember the difference between "fond" and "hell on earth".

      --
      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
    2. Re:Fortran by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Oh, thanks for the confidence. In the fremtid I'll remember to only bruge words from my modersmål when I'm uncertain how a particular word should be stavet.

  2. Don't worry.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Microsoft will come along and tell you what your choice will be.

    1. Re:Don't worry.... by tomhudson · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hand in your geek card. Leading zeros are not significant, unless you're filming "Tora Tora Tora!"

  3. Why pick just one? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Write concurrently in two languages, then you're sure to make full use of available CPU cores.

  4. obligatory.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I, for one Welcome our new Choice Overloads....

  5. Re:It's drivel by shaka · · Score: 1, Funny

    Have you ever known anybody to say: "There are just too many girls to choose from, I guess I'll go hide in the basement."?
    Or: "There are ten thousand restaurants in this city. I just can't cope. I'm going to stop eating."?

    A better label for the whole subject would be: " How a small minority of people fail to learn tree-pruning techniques, and dissolve in panic." Then we all could say: "Yep, sounds like my ex-girlfriend. Been there, done that. Next?"

    Girls to choose from?! Ex-girlfriend?!?!! Last night just called, it wants your dream back!
    --
    :wq!
  6. Re:It's drivel by Lisandro · · Score: 2, Funny

    This whole idea of 'choice overload' is so much drivel, IMHO. And, no, I'm not trying to flame here.

    Ditto. You think too many choices of programming languages is a bad thing? Let's have two. And let one be Perl, that should be fun to watch.

    (Yes, i do like Perl :)

  7. Re:2-4 cores -- why bother? by thatskinnyguy · · Score: 3, Funny

    On the other hand, I heard that maybe 16 processors is an upper limit for the shared memory multi-threaded model because of all of the cache synchronization issues, and to go beyond that, you will need to go to clusters with communication between local processor memory. Beowulf Cluster on one processor die. How badass would that be? And by badass, I mean, totally 1337. And by "be", I mean be.
    --
    The game.
  8. I'm about by jsse · · Score: 2, Funny

    to welcome our new Choice Overlord personally until I found that I misread.

    Sorry.

  9. Re:intel is part of the problem (sort of) by Fulcrum+of+Evil · · Score: 2, Funny

    It isn't a silver bullet, but if it helps, so much the better; I like having lots of bullets to choose from.

    --
    "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
  10. Re:It's drivel by NewWorldDan · · Score: 2, Funny

    No, but I have heard people say, "There are just too many girls to choose from. I'll take the easy way out and hook up with one of the ugly ones." This apparently explains the continued existance of COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC.