How We'll Program 1000 Cores - and Get Linus Ranting, Again

vikingpower writes For developers, 2015 got kick-started mentally by a Linus Torvald rant about parallel computing being a bunch of crock. Although Linus' rants are deservedly famous for the political incorrectness and (often) for their insight, it may be that Linus has overlooked Gustafson's Law. Back in 2012, the High Scalability blog already ran a post pointing towards new ways to think about parallel computing, especially the ideas of David Ungar, who thinks in the direction of lock-less computing of intermediary, possibly faulty results that are updated often. At the end of this year, we may be thinking differently about parallel server-side computing than we do today.

Comments

Re:Pullin' a Gates?

[AchilleTalon]

It won't turn wrong. Linus is right on this one. We are talking about massively-parallel computing and Linus describes it right. It is a niche which will need specific algorithms tuned for the hardware (GPU or other) the pipeline must be kept busy to observe a performance gain. It doesn't scale to general purpose computing.