Re: RAC or Large SMP...?

From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter_at_googlemail.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:12:58 +0200
Message-ID: <6l8rlqFb16ubU1@mid.individual.net>


On 10.10.2008 08:38, Tim X wrote:

> There is a growing argument that one of the main limitations of
> multi-core systems isn't at the hardware level, but rather, at the
> software level. In particular, the lack of good support in many
> languages for writing software that is able to exploit parallel
> processing efficiently. The few languages that provide such support
> often rely heavily on the ability of the programmer to understand the
> complexities and have the skills to adopt algorithms suitable for such
> processing. such programmers are rare, particularly in the current era
> of out sourcing and commodity development where the emphasis tends to be
> towards programmers that are API driven code monkeys that have little
> depth of knowledge regarding algorithms and data structures generally
> and probably little, if any, knowledge of issues associated with
> parallel processing.

I believe this analysis is spot on, but...

> There are some very interesting approaches being
> developed and I'm confident that in time, many of these considerations
> will be handled by clever compilers and sophisticated language support
> and APIs that are multi-core aware, but thats probably a way off yet.

... I am not too optimistic here. I do believe that we will see some improvements over time (for example, since Java 5 there are more abstractions of concurrency constructs which help building concurrent applications that do scale better). But I do not see that we will come to a situation where the programmer provides a sequential problem description and gets parallel execution. For a very long time the people implementing parallelized applications will have to do the analysis and design work that determines which parts can be done concurrently and how synchronization must take place. And from my experience this is the crucial part in getting scalability through concurrency into an application.

Kind regards

        robert Received on Fri Oct 10 2008 - 06:12:58 CDT

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