Thoughts on parallel programming?

[Fawzi Mohamed]

On 11-nov-10, at 15:16, Fawzi Mohamed wrote:

> On 11-nov-10, at 09:58, Russel Winder wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 2010-11-11 at 02:24 +0000, jfd wrote:
>>> Any thoughts on parallel programming.  I was looking at something  
>>> about Chapel
>>> and X10 languages etc. for parallelism, and it looks interesting.   
>>> I know that
>>> it is still an area of active research, and it is not yet (far  
>>> from?) done,
>>> but anyone have thoughts on this as future direction?  Thank you.

I just finished reading "Parallel Programmability and the Chapel  
Language" by Chamberlain, Callahan and Zima.
A very nice read, and overview of several languages and approaches.
Still I stand by my earlier view, an MPI like approach is more  
flexible, but indeed having a nice parallel implementation of  
distributed arrays (which on MPI one can have using Global Arrays for  
example), can be very useful.
I think that a language like D can hide these behind wrapper objects,  
and reach for these objects (that are not the only ones present in a  
complex parallel program) an expressivity similar to chapel using the  
approach I have in blip.
A direct implementation might be more efficient on shared memory  
machines though.