Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Language Challenges for Multi-Core Processors

In Jim Turley's recent Silicon Insider, he talked about multi-core processors.
But new compilers and debuggers won't be enough. We're facing a change to new programming languages. Current languages like C don't express parallelism well. Compilers can identify threads of execution or independent constructs and extract some small amounts of parallelism here and there, but the language itself prevents large-scale parallelism. If we're to exploit these new multi-processor chips, we're going to have to swallow hard, roll up our sleeves, and tackle a truly Herculean task.

Hmm. Languages that express parallelism well. I wonder where I can find one of those?

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2 Comments:

At 1:13 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hm, parallelism in LV is great, but LV will never spread into the "normal" programming world just for one reason: there're no alternatives of compilers and development environments available. With the switch to LV 8 I had to experience that dependence on just one vendor is a really bad thing. And LV isn't very cheap actually...

I must admit, though, that I can't imagine such an easy and elegent way of implementing parallelism in a text language like in LV, but maybe I just haven't worked with the right one yet.

 
At 8:36 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

So what exaclty is he implying by saying "we're going to have to swallow hard, roll up our sleeves, and tackle a truly Herculean task." ?

Learning a new language? New compilers? What is the Herculean solution to this problem?

 

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