Is Parallelism the New New Thing?

astwon sends us to a blog post by parallel computing pioneer Bill McColl speculating that, with the cooling of Web 2.0, parallelism may be a hot new area for entrepreneurs and investors. (Take with requisite salt grains as he is the founder of a Silicon Valley company in this area.) McColl suggests a few other upcoming "new things," such as Saas as an appliance and massive memory systems. Worth a read.

Comments

About time

[olddotter]

When I was in graduate school in the mid '90's I thought Parallelism would be the next big thing. Needless to say I was a bit early on that prediction. Finally maybe those graduate classes and grant work will pay off. :-)

Re:About time

[UbuntuLinux]

As a user of Linux, I have to say the Parallelism is the 'old thing', as Linux has supported parallel operations for over a decade. Compare this to closed source, proprietary operating systems, such as Windows, where this sort of thing is relatively new.

I remember back in the late 90's writing some kernel modules for Linux, I was astounded by how easy it was. Even though my CPU at the time only had a single core, the power of Linux allowed it to execute more then one code stream at a time. When attempting the same thing on a closed source, properietary operating system, things were much more difficult. This is yet another reason for people to support open source software - it is through the contributions of the general public that Linux has grown so vastly superior to every other mainstream operating system in this regard, and just about every other.

Microsoft are literally shitting themselves about Linux, and articles like this really drive it home.

Re:About time

[Gerzel]

"Proprietary closed-source operating systems had these functions FIRST before Linux was a twinkle in Linus Torvalds's shorts."

Do not mock the shorts of Torvalds, for they are mighty indeed!

Re:ACtually

[garett_spencley]

Paul ?

Paul Otellini ?

I didn't know you posted on slashdot !

So what's up man ? Can I buy you a beer ?

Please no

[Wiseman1024]

Not parallelism... Why do MBA idiots have to fill everything with their crap? Now they'll start creating buzzwords, reading stupid web logs (called "blogs"), filling magazines with acronyms...

Coming soon: professional object-oriented XML-based AJAX-powered scalable five-nines high-availability multi-tier enterprise turnkey business solutions that convert visitors into customers, optimize cash flows, discover business logic and opportunities, and create synergy between their stupidity and their bank accounts - parallelized.

Re:Didn't we have this debate last week?

[spottedkangaroo]

But, at the end of the day (where the rubber meets the road) this will utilize the core competencies of solutions that specialize in the new ||ism forefront.

Always Was, Always WIll Be

[StCredZero]

Parallelism was a hot area when I was in grad school 10 years back. We used to say about Gallium Arsenide -- "Gallium Arsenide is the semiconductor of the future -- always was, always will be." Maybe the same thing is true with parallelism -- paradigm of the future -- it's always useful as a way of getting more work done per unit time, but it has high costs associated with it, so people will only use it if it feels like they absolutely have to.

Parallelism has had broad applicability in graphics. It's definitely useful. But I doubt it's going to obsolete what we can do sequentially.

Re:1% of programmers

[Otter]

Do you have anything, even anecdotal evidence to support that?

Conveniently, the DailyWTF steps in to provide some anecdotal evidence:

When I showed my lead the old code and the new, he responded, ah, that must have been Jed Code; yeah, he really hated anything that had to use arrays or loops, he couldn't see the point of them ... I think each month he would uncomment the next month and redeploy the application

In fact, I've encountered quite a few programmers (whom I don't hire, so don't blame me) who don't understand anything past variable assignment and flow control. I also know that the people who do hire programmers routinely ask the most basic questions about iteration and weed out quite a few candidates that way.

Incidentally, I didn't mean to denigrate web developers, who come in great, good, adequate and DailyWTF, just as everyone else in IT does. But I'd be surprised if including them in "developers" didn't further drive down the percentage with experience in parallelization.