> but MIMD is more easily applied. Almost any application can be refactored to spawn lightweight threads for many calculations without any explicit knowledge of the π-calculus.

MIMD hasn't been shown to scale, and its not locking that is the problem, but I/O and memory.

> To your point and for a well-understood example, make -j doesn't always result in faster compilations. It may if you have the ability to leverage imbalances in CPU and storage hierarchies, but you can also kill your performance with context switches (including disk seeking).

When Martin Odersky began pushing actors as a solution to Scala and multi-core, this was my immediate thought: the Scala compiler is slow, can this make it go faster? It was pretty obvious after some thought that the answer was no. But then we have no way yet of casting compilation as a data-parallel task (a point in favor of task parallelism, but it doesn't help us much).