There are many parallel programming compilers and libraries. Which one is good for you?

Michael Wolfe, Compiler Engineer at The Portland Group, Inc., writes an article on many available options that claim to make parallel programming easy, discusses complexity of parallelism, and offers a few methods for solving the current “parallelism crisis”.

“The current “parallelism crisis” can only be resolved by three things. First, we need to develop and, more importantly, teach a range of parallel algorithms… Second, we need to expand algorithm analysis to include different parallelism styles. It’s not enough to focus on just the BSP or SIMD or any other model; we must understand several models and how they map onto the target systems…Finally, we need to learn how to analyze and tune actual parallel programs.”

“Parallel processing is an obstacle, but then so is sequential processing. Parallel computing can result in better productivity, efficiency, and accuracy in the scientific process overall, but it’s silly to think that it will result in better productivity and efficiency in the programming process itself. The best we can hope for is to make parallel programming not much harder than sequential programming.”

Full Story