Pervasive parallel computing: an historic opportunity for innovation in programming and architecture

Abstract

Parallel programming has been the subject of deep research for decades -- and renowned in the software community as a difficult challenge to the degree that many companies have teams of parallelism and concurrency experts. Further, many ISV's explicitly design their software architectures so as to ensure that the majority of the development effort, including of course debug and test, can be done without consideration of parallelism. What makes parallelism so difficult, are the knotty and coupled problems of correctness, performance -- particularly data locality, and software modularity.