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Blade, Intel Push Parallel Programming, Software's Holy Grail: Page 2 of 4

Then we entered what I like to call the age (mostly, where we are now) where we pretended parallel programming was licked. Multiple physical and logic cores were available, and multiple threads on top of each core. But, in the vast majority of case, only the most gross level of decomposition and load balancing is/has been done.

I submit that running a different operating-system instance in a thread is not where we thought we were headed when we talked about achieving true parallelism, notwithstanding the advantages one can obtaining by doing this.

Also, when you look at the current situation, we've basically got many cases where there's the computer equivalent of V-12 engines being driven to the supermarket. There's so much processing power available, there's no imperative to use it efficiently.

I submit that this will change, as we get "greener." (Energy costs will become a gating factor, at least until we get smart and start building nuclear power plants. But I digress.)

Networking gear may in fact become an ongoing proving ground for better parallel programming techniques, because there's more of a history here of leaning and meaner hardware that's appropriately matched to the task.