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A comment on The Future of Computing - An Interview with Yukihiro “Matz" Matsumoto.

Re:The Future of Computing - An Interview with Yukihiro “Mat... by simonh on Saturday June 29, 2013 @05:23PM (#5963749)
The idea that faster parallel hardware will lead to a parallel software future is nice, but I don't really buy it. For example the move towards cloud computing is the big thing these days but its completely orthogonal to that. The cost savings from cloud services are driven by making highly parallel hardware look like an awful lot of one or perhaps two core servers for dozens of clients at the same time.

In other words the big ground breaking world shaking trend in computing isn't about running clever parallel applications on clever parallel hardware at all, instead its about leveraging that hardware to make good old single threaded applications run as cheaply as possible.

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Re:The Future of Computing - An Interview with Yukihiro “Mat... by slacka on Saturday June 29, 2013 @07:20PM (#5964056)
Everyone's niche in the industry taints their perspective; we’re clearly on opposite ends of this spectrum. Over the past 10 years, I have seen a shift from Unix/Linux x86 servers, to beowulf clusters, to GPU based clusters, and most recently a project with Intel Phi boards.

A common thread throughout this progression has been the lack of proper software and tools to parallelize the workload. The team is constantly on the lookout for new tools and is thrilled about upcoming technologies like Parallella.

In your field, where cheap CPU cycles is paramount, you may not see it. But for our team running the sims, your "good old single threaded" performance has been meaningless for years.

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