From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <5978d69bfd72141dfdf2afb79ba4e7da@quanstro.net> References: <3aaafc130903031633n19ce8800ma5eeee44886bed52@mail.gmail.com> <5978d69bfd72141dfdf2afb79ba4e7da@quanstro.net> Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 18:47:09 -0800 Message-ID: <4f34febc0903031847v17da1f5rad1d9e9ad71bc7fd@mail.gmail.com> From: John Barham To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: Re: [9fans] threads vs forks Topicbox-Message-UUID: aefa766c-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 4:54 PM, erik quanstrom wrot= e: >> I should have qualified. I mean *massive* parallelization when applied >> to "average" use cases. I don't think it's totally unusable (I >> complain about synchronous I/O on my phone every day), but it's being >> pushed as a panacea, and that is what I think is wrong. Don Knuth >> holds this opinion, but I think he's mostly alone on that, >> unfortunately. > > it's interesting that parallel wasn't cool when chips were getting > noticably faster rapidly. =A0perhaps the focus on parallelization > is a sign there aren't any other ideas. That seems to be what Knuth thinks. Excerpt from a 2008 interview w/ Infor= mIT: "InformIT: Vendors of multicore processors have expressed frustration at the difficulty of moving developers to this model. As a former professor, what thoughts do you have on this transition and how to make it happen? Is it a question of proper tools, such as better native support for concurrency in languages, or of execution frameworks? Or are there other solutions? Knuth: I don=92t want to duck your question entirely. I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they=92re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore=92s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won=92t be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific=97until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write." Full interview is at http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=3D1193= 856.