What makes parallel programming hard? | Future Chips. Multi-cores are here, and they are here to stay. Industry trends show that each individual core is likely to become smaller and slower (see my post to understand the reason). Improving performance of a single program with multi-core requires that the program be split into threads that can run on multiple cores concurrently. In effect, this pushes the problem of finding parallelism in the code to the programmers.
I have noticed that many hardware designers do not understand the MT challenges (since they have never written MT apps). This post is to show them the tip of this massive iceberg.Update 5/26/2011: I have also written a case study for parallel programming which may interest you. Why finding parallelism is hard? Some jobs are easy to parallelize, e.g., if it takes one guy 8 hours to paint a room, then two guys working in parallel can paint it in four hours. Notice how the variable mb is written every iteration and no iteration uses the mb written by the previous iterations. Share.
Space stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation. - By Neal Stephenson. The phenomena of path dependence and lock-in can be illustrated with many examples, but one of the most vivid is the gear we use to launch things into space. Rockets are a very old invention. The Chinese have had them for something like 1,000 years. Francis Scott Key wrote about them during the War of 1812 and we sing about them at every football game.
As late as the 1930s, however, they remained small, experimental, and failure-prone. There is no way, of course, to guess how rockets might have developed, or failed to, were it not for the fact that, during the 1940s, the world's most technically sophisticated nation was under the absolute control of a crazy dictator who decreed that vast physical and intellectual resources should be hurled into the project of creating rockets of hitherto unimagined size. Atomic bombs turned out to be expensive, dirty, controversial, and of limited military use (it was difficult to find targets sufficiently large to be worth using them on). 1. 1. 2. 3. Play Farragomate. Fast Numerical Methods for Inverse Kinematics. CIO Blast from the Past: 60 years of Hamming codes - Richard Hamming, mathematics, history, Hamming code, coding, blast from the past. Richard W. Hamming pioneered Hamming codes, a discovery that would lay an important foundation for the entire modern computing and communications industries In 1950 Bell Labs researcher Richard W.
Hamming made a discovery that would lay an important foundation for the entire modern computing and communications industries. He had invented a code for correcting errors in communication and the Hamming code was born. CIO Blast from the Past takes a journey through 60 years of information theory and discovers how the Hamming code legacy lives on today. Richard W Hamming was born in Chicago in 1915. He studied mathematics at three universities and received a bachelor of science, master of arts and a PhD. From there, he moved to Bell Labs where he spent 30 years in various aspects of computing, numerical analysis, and management of computing.
In April 1950 the American Telegraph and Telephone company published Volume 29 of the Bell System Technical Journal. Meet the Shannon bound. Justice was served.