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What Makes Parallel Programming Difficult?

Posted by Unknown on from the double-the-threads-double-the-fun dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Intel's Aater Suleman writes about why parallel programming is difficult. ... I was unaware ... that a major challenge in multi-threaded programming lies in optimizing parallel programs not just getting them to run. His analysis is insightful and the case study is very enlightening if you are unfamiliar with parallel code debugging. "

3 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Easy! by sgbett · · Score: 5, Funny

    is that things sometimes happen in the wrong order.

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    Invaders must die
  2. Re:Easy! by sgbett · · Score: 5, Funny

    The problem with parallel programming

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    Invaders must die
  3. Re:unaware? WTF? by Mongoose+Disciple · · Score: 5, Insightful

    synchronization with data separation, mutex's and avoiding deadlocks and race conditions has been solved since almost the beginning of parallelism

    And yet people constantly get these details wrong in practice.

    It's an extra layer of complexity and it introduces extra chances to make mistakes, even around areas where a programmer could know better. There's not much way around that. If people only made coding mistakes around difficult problems software would be dramatically more bulletproof than it actually is.