Comments on: Go Parallel with Google’s Go http://blog.utest.com/go-parallel-with-googles-go/2009/11/ Software Testing Community Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:18:02 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Larry Bernstein http://blog.utest.com/go-parallel-with-googles-go/2009/11/comment-page-1/#comment-14590 Larry Bernstein Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:20:10 +0000 http://blog.utest.com/?p=2476#comment-14590 Does anyone know of a book on the design and architecture for parallel programming aimed at multicore systems. Issues like precedence analysis, locking, queuing impacts, data structure and layout design would be covered amongst others. Does anyone know of a book on the design and architecture for parallel programming aimed at multicore systems. Issues like precedence analysis, locking, queuing impacts, data structure and layout design would be covered amongst others.

]]> By: Stanton Champion http://blog.utest.com/go-parallel-with-googles-go/2009/11/comment-page-1/#comment-14583 Stanton Champion Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:05:34 +0000 http://blog.utest.com/?p=2476#comment-14583 Dan - glad you enjoyed the post. Thanks for the additional info. I hadn't even considered the difficulty of porting libraries. Dan – glad you enjoyed the post. Thanks for the additional info. I hadn’t even considered the difficulty of porting libraries.

]]> By: Dan G http://blog.utest.com/go-parallel-with-googles-go/2009/11/comment-page-1/#comment-14582 Dan G Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:05:27 +0000 http://blog.utest.com/?p=2476#comment-14582 Roy -- The gamers have dealt with multithreading since the latest generation of game consoles (PS3, XBox 360) hit the market. You can access either platform's game development environment or use the open (C/Linux) environment available on PS3. Contact Fixstars, now maintainer of YDL, in regards to the latter. (Hint: it uses pthreads.) As you say, it comes down to programmers' shaking off the laziness of the single-thread, single-core paradigm (i.e., Moore's Law will make processors increase in speed forever). If you want to see some highly technical discussions of this, check out http://cellperformance.com, started by game developer Mike Acton (with my support, a long time ago) or any of the other game developers' sites. But also realize that the change to multithreading is more than just language and OS support. Applications today are written on top of layers upon layers of libraries... libraries that were also created under the single-thread paradigm. Like trying to make non-re-entrant code re-entrant, shifting these libraries to enable multithreading securely and reliably may require substantial rewrites... or writing them from scratch. That's going to take a long time. :-( Roy — The gamers have dealt with multithreading since the latest generation of game consoles (PS3, XBox 360) hit the market. You can access either platform’s game development environment or use the open (C/Linux) environment available on PS3. Contact Fixstars, now maintainer of YDL, in regards to the latter. (Hint: it uses pthreads.)

As you say, it comes down to programmers’ shaking off the laziness of the single-thread, single-core paradigm (i.e., Moore’s Law will make processors increase in speed forever). If you want to see some highly technical discussions of this, check out http://cellperformance.com, started by game developer Mike Acton (with my support, a long time ago) or any of the other game developers’ sites.

But also realize that the change to multithreading is more than just language and OS support. Applications today are written on top of layers upon layers of libraries… libraries that were also created under the single-thread paradigm. Like trying to make non-re-entrant code re-entrant, shifting these libraries to enable multithreading securely and reliably may require substantial rewrites… or writing them from scratch. That’s going to take a long time. :-(

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