Just to add, there are languages designed specifically to exploit parallel architectures, effective in both shared-memory and non-shared-memory environments. Bit of a plug, but see KRoC
(the Kent Retargetable occam-pi Compiler). And google for CSP (Tony Hoare, Bill Roscoe) for the formal semantics that make such parallel systems "safe" (and understandable/composable).
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Just to add, there are languages designed specifically to exploit parallel architectures, effective in both shared-memory and non-shared-memory environments. Bit of a plug, but see KRoC (the Kent Retargetable occam-pi Compiler). And google for CSP (Tony Hoare, Bill Roscoe) for the formal semantics that make such parallel systems "safe" (and understandable/composable).