Thoughts on parallel programming?

[Gary Whatmore]

%u Wrote:

> Sean Kelly Wrote:
> 
> > Walter Bright Wrote:
> > 
> > > Russel Winder wrote:
> > > > At the heart of all this is that programmers are taught that algorithm
> > > > is a sequence of actions to achieve a goal.  Programmers are trained to
> > > > think sequentially and this affects their coding.  This means that
> > > > parallelism has to be expressed at a sufficiently high level that
> > > > programmers can still reason about algorithms as sequential things. 
> > > 
> > > I think it's more than being trained to think sequentially. I think it is in the 
> > > inherent nature of how we think.
> > 
> > Distributed programming is essentially a bunch of little sequential program that interact, which is basically how people cooperate in the real world.  I think that is by far the most intuitive of any concurrent programming model, though it's still a significant conceptual shift from the traditional monolithic imperative program.
> 
> Intel promised this AVX instruction set next year. Does it also work like distributed processes? I hear it doubles your FLOPS. These are exciting times parallel computing. Lots of new medias for distributed message passing programming. Lots of little fibers filling the multimedia pipelines with parallel data. Might even beat GPU soon if Larrabee comes.

AVX isn't parallel programming, it's vector processing. A dying breed of paradigms. Parallel programming deals with concurrency. OpenMP and MPI. Chapel (don't know it, but heard it here). Fortran. These are all good examples. AVX is just a cpu intrinsics stuff in std.intrinsics