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To: WOSG
Well the Corp desktop word processor may be the last place we would see it. But parallel processors are doing spectacularly well!
15 posted on 02/16/2005 9:15:54 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach (A Proud member of Free Republic ~~The New Face of the Fourth Estate since 1996.)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach
The hardware for parallelism is becoming more common, but the programming environments are still in an early stage of development.

Some compilers are attempting to automatically generate code from common languages like "C" to take advantage of parallel execution.

On Macs, we can write SIMD vector processing code for G4 and G5 processors using "C"-type languages. And we can use multiple CPUs, so coarse-grained and fine-grained parallelism are available together.

A few specialized programming languages exist to better utilize parallelism. Some time ago, I learned a language called "Occam" for a processor called the "Transputer". The language was simple, but designing code that avoids deadlocks, livelocks, race conditions, etc. requires a lot of effort. Computers could contain multiple Transputer chips, and Occam would automatically distribute the processing and handle the communications between each chip. If I recall correctly, each Transputer had four built-in serial communication paths, so grid topologies could be easily designed.

16 posted on 02/18/2005 6:15:34 AM PST by HAL9000 (Links to News Sources - http://tinyurl.com/3kys9)
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