Re:Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web
by fulafel on Friday May 24, 2013 @06:30AM
(#5762048)
Many things are hard to parallelize using current technology, and there indeed has been lots of research done on it. History goes back to the supercomputer era (Cray, Connection Machine, Transputer etc.)
The term of art is "inherently sequential" problems (vs "embarrassingly parallel").
In addition, the programming effort gets untenable quickly due to Amdahl's law when the amount of parallelism increases. Eg. if you have 100 cores, even if only 1% of work in your program is sequential, your performance goes down the drain. Currently we're in the comfy phase of the curve with few cores...
We've been making good progress with parallel-minded reimaginings of programming languages and computer architectures on one front: GPUs. On the CPU we are saddled with the inertia and backwards compatibiltiy lock-in of tools and culture (witness lasting use of C++ as a tool to write parallel software)
The term of art is "inherently sequential" problems (vs "embarrassingly parallel").
In addition, the programming effort gets untenable quickly due to Amdahl's law when the amount of parallelism increases. Eg. if you have 100 cores, even if only 1% of work in your program is sequential, your performance goes down the drain. Currently we're in the comfy phase of the curve with few cores...
We've been making good progress with parallel-minded reimaginings of programming languages and computer architectures on one front: GPUs. On the CPU we are saddled with the inertia and backwards compatibiltiy lock-in of tools and culture (witness lasting use of C++ as a tool to write parallel software)