Greg Pfister on his blog writes a three part series titled “101 Parallel Languages”. In it he discusses whether new parallel programming languages are needed with the emergence of multicore processors. In Part 1, he gives a link to a list of 101 parallel programming languages, all in active development, all with zero significant use. An excerpt:
The HPC community has been trying to flog the parallel programming language horse info life for almost forty years. These are the people who do scientific and technical computing (mostly), including things like fluid dynamics of combustion in jet engines, pricing of the now-infamous tranches of mortgage-backed securities, and so on. They’re motivated. Faster means more money to the financial guys (I’ve heard estimates of millions of dollars a minute if you’re a millisecond faster than the competition), fame and tenure to scientists, product deadlines for crash simulators, and so on. They include the guys who use (and get the funding for) the government-funded record-smashing installations at national labs like Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, etc., the places always reported on the front pages of newspapers as “the world’s fastest computer.” (They’re not, because they’re not one computer, but let that pass for now.)
Here are the links to three parts.
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1 Multicoreinfo.com posts its “best of” list | insideHPC // Dec 24, 2008 at 1:41 pm
[...] spent some time this year think about Greg Pfister’s post, highlighted on the list. Check out the post (and the list) [...]