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Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust
mlimber writes "The New York Times is running a story about multicore computing and the efforts of Microsoft et al. to try to switch to the new paradigm: "The challenges [of parallel programming] have not dented the enthusiasm for the potential of the new parallel chips at Microsoft, where executives are betting that the arrival of manycore chips — processors with more than eight cores, possible as soon as 2010 — will transform the world of personal computing.... Engineers and computer scientists acknowledge that despite advances in recent decades, the computer industry is still lagging in its ability to write parallel programs." It mirrors what C++ guru and now Microsoft architect Herb Sutter has been saying in articles such as his "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software." Sutter is part of the C++ standards committee that is working hard to make multithreading standard in C++."
Because Java application servers have been multi-threaded for a long, long time.
Obviously, I haven't read the article.
Blar.
The reason that parallel programming is so hard is that we're still using the same computing model that English mathematician Charles Babbage pioneered 150 years ago. It's time to change. To understand the problem, read, Parallel Programming, Math, and the Curse of the Algorithm.
Threads are the second worse thing to have happened to computing, in my opinion. They make the problem worse. Ask Intel and Microsoft. They've been trying to make threads works for years and they've spent a lot of money on it. They have nothing interesting to show for their effort. What's amazing to me is that we've had the answer to parallel programming with us all along. We are just blind to it, for whatever psycho-social reason. We've been using it to parallelize processes in such applications as cellular automata, simulations, neural networks for decades. And without using threads, mind you. We just need to apply the same principle at the instruction level and design development tools and special multicore CPUs to support the model. Read Half a Century of Crappy Computing to find out more.