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0 pointsexit15y ago0 comments

Thanks, that does make a lot clearer.

It seems to me you and i are very comfortably coordinating sharing resources right now. In parallel, a browser is running on my computer, a browser is running on your computer, and an http server is running on the hn server.

But between us we're doing some collaborative. We are both contributing text out of which a single document is synthesized, and we might both have up voted this story, etc.

Our collaboration here is structured in terms of http requests/responses. Does this in itself address issues of "race conditions", "deadlocks", etc?

Can we imagine a future in which computation and memory are so abundant, we can virtualize this client/server paradigm for any collaborating parallel programs?

Or can we imagine a future in which there is no need to parallelize a large class of programs, because they will execute satisfyingly fast in a single thread?

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samps15y ago

Unfortunately, a client/server model still does not solve all of our concurrency problems. The problem is that the algorithm we're running--contributing a handful to text responses to the same repository--is very simple. But more complicated algorithms--say, if you're Google for instance, looking for a few words in billions of documents--need significantly more expertise to be correct (and perform well on top of that!).

It's certainly feasible to imagine that single-threaded performance will improve to the point that parallelism will no longer be "necessary" (although many people have observed that, with Moore's Law no longer yielding the performance improvements it did just a few years ago, this may be too far out). However, applications arise and expand to fill whatever performance we have available. By achieving parallel performance gains, we'll enable things that weren't possible before, no matter how good single-threaded performance is. Also important is the distinction between parallelism and concurrency: many domains need multiple threads for reasons that have nothing to do with performance! A database server, for instance, needs to service many requests concurrently; it can't function correctly in a "single-threaded" world.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse