Saturday, May 29, 2010

The Resurgence of Parallelism

Parallelism is not new; the realization that it is essential for continued progress in high-performance computing is. — The Resurgence of Parallelism, CACM
This must be the best quote countering the "faddish rallying cries" for in-language parallelism. Really, unless you're doing HPC, parallelism seems to be a red herring.

For scalable storage for example, I'd much rather extend shared-nothing to the per-core level.

Linus sez:

I'm ranting against the idiots who continue to talk about how software must be more highly threaded, and how multi-core is the inevitable future.

Those people are morons. It's not the inevitable future at all. Software programmers should not think that they have to write multi-threaded programs. It's too hard, and the payoff is too little. And it absolutely isn't where the industry is even going.

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