Parallel programming, are we not learning from history again?
- by mezmo
I started programming because I was a hardware guy that got bored, I thought the problems being solved in the software side of things were much more interesting than those in hardware. At that time, most of the electrical buses I dealt with were serial, some moving data as fast as 1.5 megabit!! ;)
Over the years these evolved into parallel buses in order to speed communication up, after all, transferring 8/16/32/64, whatever bits at a time incredibly speeds up the transfer. Well, our ability to create and detect state changes got faster and faster, to the point where we could push data so fast that interference between parallel traces or cable wires made cleaning the signal too expensive to continue, and we still got reasonable performance from serial interfaces, heck some graphics interfaces are even happening over USB for a while now.
I think I'm seeing a like trend in software now, our processors were getting faster and faster, so we got good at building "serial" software. Now we've hit a speed bump in raw processor speed, so we're adding cores, or "traces" to the mix, and spending a lot of time and effort on learning how to properly use those. But I'm also seeing what I feel are advances in things like optical switching and even quantum computing that could take us far more quickly that I was expecting back to the point where "serial programming" again makes the most sense.
What are your thoughts?
