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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."

4 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. link to the paper by skywire · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/whenchoice.html

    --
    Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
  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: 5, Insightful
      > "Microsoft will come along and tell you what your choice will be."

      And they'll change it every three years, so as to make more money off of certifications, software sales, and save money by not having to fix bugs in that "old, obsolete" stuff that was so "shiney new" stuff so recently.

      If Microsoft wants to tell me what to do, they'd better be ready to sign a check with 6 figures to the left of the decimal point ...

  3. Re:It's drivel by nycguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, both of your analogies are poor. The problem with "choice overload" in the software context is that with so many platforms to choose from, no one platform builds the critical mass to be useful for a broad range of problems, and developers are almost certain to build systems and components that do not interoperate because they are built in separate frameworks. In software, there's a benefit to having everyone chose the same platform to build on.

    On the other hand, I don't know about the benefit of everyone chosing the same girl or the same restaurant, though--unless you like gang-bangs, long lines, etc.