Are you ready for 100 cores?

Massively parallel computing is something I’ve been interested in for a while and have blogged about a few times in the past. This blog entry by an Intel Researcher
made me think about it again. He continues to proclaim that the future
isn’t that far away and we had better start designing our software so
that it can run on machines with thousands of cores. He worries that
we’re aren’t ready yet and we need to start getting ready. And he’s
right.

Being a tools guy, I think this is the next big paradigm
that the tooling industry needs to address. Object-oriented programming
and design was a godsend when machines started scaling up in the size
of memory and storage and our programs began filling that with data. We
built a lot of tools to help with that. Programming languages and
compilers are obvious examples. But so is the JDT and CDT, with their
code analysis to show type hierarchies and help you easily find
classes. Not to mention all the object modeling tools for drawing
pictures of your classes.

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