Getting Positioned in Parallel
As multicore issues arise in your personal programming practice, what you want to know is how to position yourself in the new arena. I have a few practical observations to share on this score.
Go Ahead, Drink the Koolaid
It really all depends on what we are referring to when we ask the software agent to solve the riddle of which tastes better coke or pepsi?. In the typical user-web-browser-search-engine-interaction, the onus for all of the parallel processing is on the user.
One Little Question, That's All...
After all, what does Project Purity have to do with Megaton and Vault 101? Now that you mention it, who watches the watchmen? How will we know when the Singularity is near? All important questions in some domain. Each question hiding an even more fundamental problem.
OpenMP vs. OpenMP
If you're a fan of Seinfeld's Cosmo Kramer, you know there's no better way to start the day than with a good old-fashioned catfight. I don't know that if it rises to that level, but I do think that the OpenMP back-and-forth between Charles Leiserson, coauthor of Introduction to Algorithms and cofounder of Cilk Arts, and Ruud van der Pas, a senior staff engineer at Sun and coauthor of Using OpenMP, makes for some fascinating reading.
So How Are We Doin', One Programmer Asks Another
"So how are we doing?" James Reinders rhetorically asked a roomful of programmers at SD West 2009 when referring to his Eight Rules for Parallel Programming for Multicore.
Implementing a Standard
It's important to understand the difference between a standard (such as the Multicore Association's Multicore Communications API, "MCAPI") and the implementation of that standard (such as PolyCore Software's "Poly-Messenger/MCAPI"). In order for software developers to take advantage of a standard, there must be an implementation of that standard that supports the architectures on which the application developer wishes their software to run.
Multicore and Power Consumption: Ask James About It
Power naps. Now there's something I can relate to. No, not because I get a few minutes of shut-eye in the middle of the afternoon, but because I was just reading about this topic in The Problem of Power Consumption in Servers. The problem, of course, is that data centers are energy hogs, costing money and squander resources.
Search Space ... the final frontier
NP/NP complete and AI-complete problems are problems with huge or even infinite search or state spaces. The search or state space is a graph (or other representation) that contains all of the possible states (including the initial and goal states of the problem) of the domain of the initial problem. An example of a huge search space is all the nodes on the Internet ...
Going Parallel: Part 2: So who's really writing parallel applications?
In a crazy moment sometime ago I forked out a few UK Pounds registering a url how-parallel-is-your-software.com (not the real address). The plan was to use the site to let people register any applications they found that ran parallel. Perhaps even run a competition to see who could find the most parallel commercial application. Maybe this would be the route to me becoming the next dotcom millionaire! I never had the nerve to bring the idea to life. I suspect that the moment I published anything every lawyer in town would be knocking at my door.
