Parallelism needs killer application for mass adoption
The addition of multiple cores to microprocessors has created a significant opportunity for parallel programming, but a killer application is needed to push the concept into the mainstream
via news.idg.no
A lot of focus and money have gone into building fast machines and better programming languages, said David Patterson, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, at the conference in Stanford on Monday. Comparatively little attention has been paid to writing desktop programs in parallel, but applications such as gaming and music could change that. Users of such programs demand the best real-time performance, so programmers may have to adopt models that break up tasks over multiple threads and cores.
