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Is Parallelism the New New Thing?

Posted by kdawson on from the still-working-on-the-old-new-thing dept.

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.

3 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Didn't we have this debate last week? by Nursie · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oh yes, here it is.

    And the conclusion?

    It's been around for years numbnuts, in commercial and server applications, middle tiers, databases and a million and one other things worked on by serious software developers (i.e. not web programming dweebs).

    Parallelism has been around for ages and has been used commercially for a couple of decades. Get over it.

  2. "the bastards say 'welcome'" by david.emery · · Score: 4, Informative

    So all-of-a-sudden people have discovered parallelism? Gee, one of the really interesting things about Ada in the late 80s was its use on multiprocessor systems such as those produced by Sequent and Encore. There was a lot of work on the language itself (that went into Ada95) and on compiler technologies to support 'safe parallelism'. "Safe" here means 'correct implementation' against the language standard, considering things like cache consistency as parts of programs get implemented in different CPUs, each with its own cache.

    Here are a couple of lessons learned from that Ada experience:
    1. Sometimes you want synchronization, and sometimes you want avoidance. Ada83 Tasking/Rendezvous provided synchronization, but was hard to use for avoidance. Ada95 added protected objects to handle avoidance.
    2. In Ada83, aliasing by default was forbidden, which made it a lot easier for the compiler to reason about things like cache consistency. Ada95 added more pragmas, etc, to provide additional control on aliasing and atomic operations.
    3. A lot of the early experience with concurrency and parallelism in Ada learned (usually the hard way) that there's a 'sweet spot' in the number of concurrent actions. Too many, and the machine bogs down in scheduling and synchronization. Too few, and you don't keep all of the processors busy. One of the interesting things that Karl Nyberg worked on in his Sun T1000 contest review was the tuning necessary to keep as many cores as possible running. (http://www.grebyn.com/t1000/ ) (Disclosure: I don't work for Grebyn, but I do have an account on grebyn.com as a legacy of the old days when they were in the ISP business in the '80s, and Karl is an old friend of very long standing....)

    All this reminds me of a story from Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine. There was an article in the trade press pointing to an IBM minicomputer, with the title "IBM legitimizes minicomputers". Data General proposed (or ran, I forget which) an ad that built on that article, saying "The bastards say, 'welcome' ".

    dave

  3. Re:About time by pleappleappleap · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    Windows is not the only closed-source proprietary operating system out there. AIX and Solaris have supported parallel functions for a number of years, and various IBM mainframe operating systems have had those functions since the '70's. There are architectures which had it in the '60's.

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