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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: parallel computing
Message-ID: <8283@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 10-Jul-87 14:40:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8283
Posted: Fri Jul 10 14:40:44 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 10-Jul-87 14:40:44 EDT
References: <8270@amdahl.amdahl.com>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 15

> ... Future programs, written by future
> programmers familiar with parallel algorithms and hardware are
> likely to write programs that use parallelism...

But *which* *flavor* of parallelism?  And how are they going to do this
when the languages don't support it in a standard way?  And how are the
languages going to support it in a standard way when the current machines
are all so different from each other that's there practically no common
ground?  Parallelism is never going to get really popular in programming
until there is some vaguely portable way of expressing it, or some utterly
overwhelming consensus on the preferred architecture of parallel machines.
I am not holding my breath.
-- 
Mars must wait -- we have un-         Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
finished business on the Moon.     {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry