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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.

4 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. evolution, not revolution by nguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the guy has a "startup in stealth mode" called parallel computing. Of course he wants to generate buzz.

    Decade after decade, people keep trying to sell silver bullets for parallel computing: the perfect language, the perfect network, the perfect os, etc. Nothing ever wins big. Instead, there is a diversity of solutions for a diversity of problems, and progress is slow but steady.

  2. 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.

  3. Re:1% of programmers by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I'd believe 1% as having "some experience". Some experience is what you put on your CV when you know what the buzword means.

    If you ask how many can "regularly achieve significant performance through use of multiple threads" then 0.1% is far too high. If you mean "can exchange data between a userland thread and an ISR in compliance with the needs of reliable parallel execution" then its a safe bet that less than 0.1% are mentally up to the challenge. /. readers are not typical of the programming cummiity. These days people who can drag-and-drop call themselves programmers. Poeple who can spell "l337" are one!

    --
    Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  4. 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.