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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.

2 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. 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.