Blog: Serial Computing Is Dead; the Future Is Parallelism - Issues that force serial execution may become more difficult to handle

Serial Computing Is Dead; the Future Is Parallelism
SearchDataCenter.com (06/30/08) Botelho, Bridget

Serial computing is extinct and the future belongs to parallel computing, argued Dave Patterson, head of the University of California, Berkeley's Parallel Computing Laboratory, during his keynote speech at the Usenix conference. Parallel processing can now be executed on a single chip across multiple cores, thanks to the emergence of multicore chips, while Patterson contended that serial computing has reached its limits in terms of memory and power. He maintained that programmers who require greater performance must write programs capable of leveraging multiple cores via parallelism, and researchers at his lab have concentrated on applications that ought to be parallelized. The proper writing and implementation of parallel programs can address power issues and performance bottlenecks. But computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a recipient of the Usenix Lifetime Achievement Award, said that writing parallel applications can give rise to more problematic software rather than less. "Sequential programming is really hard, and parallel programming is a step beyond that," he said. "I have a great fear that we will have all of these cores, and our software programs will be even worse." Patterson noted that the success of parallel computing depends on its ability to improve efficiency, accuracy, and productivity, but he cautioned that the majority of programmers are not ready to write suitable parallel programs.
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