In an article, Gordon Huff, a Principal IT Advisor with Illuminata, Inc., writes a summary of his SC08 visit. Regarding parallel programming for multi (many) core processor, he writes the following.
“Parallel programming is still a challenge. So much so that all-around computing guru David Patterson devoted his plenary session to the topic. That said, based on Patterson’s session as well as the work of a variety of companies such as RapidMind and Pervasive Software, we may be starting to see at least the outlines of how developing for processors with many cores and for amalgams of many systems might progress. The issue is that parallel programming is hard and most people can’t do it. One approach is training but we seem to be developing a consensus that neither this nor new programming tools (e.g., languages) really get to the heart of the matter. Rather, the general direction seems to be towards something you might call multi-core virtualization–the abstraction of parallel complexities by carefully-crafted algorithms and runtimes that handle most of the heavy lifting.”
