Thinking Parallel

Once again, it is time for a short newscast. Notable this time is the fact, that more and more stuff seems to be written about
multi-cores, threading and parallelism in general. It feels like people do start realizing that the concurrent era is here and that they need to improve their knowledge in this field. A very encouraging sign! Or maybe its just because of Supercomputing and the recent coverage will die down again. Anyways, without further ado, here are some of the articles I found interesting lately:

• An article about GPGPU-programming – an overview of the current state of affairs, for the people who already know the idea the most interesting piece in there is probably the claimed speedups.
• James Gosling tells his views about why MPI is not such a great idea on multi-cores – and I could not agree more…
• David Dice compares parallelism to drugs in his parallelism manifesto – and wishes for a system where parallelism is described without using threads – a system, where the runtime system maps this parallelism onto threads as needed. I wonder what he thinks about Cilk?
• Closely related to the last point, I wonder how he will like the tasking-system that will be present in OpenMP 3.0? A short overview of the features to come are in this presentation, and tasking is definitely the big thing (TM) for this version of the spec.
• An article for the Java-folks out there: Billy Newport worries about Java’s and Java EE’s performance in the multi-core era. I am not sure I agree with his conclusions, though – if you look into the comments for this article, many valid objections are raised.
• My last item is neither new nor has it anything to do with parallelism, but since I imagine this blog is visited frequently by real programmers, they might be interested in the article describing themselves. My favorite quote from this article:
  

  Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.

  There is a follow up article that shows an even more real programmer. Very entertaining! 😀

Hope you found something interesting among them!