Is Parallel Programming Hard, And If So, Why?

Authors

Paul E. McKenneyFollow
Maged M. Michael
Manish Gupta
Philip William Howard, Portland State UniversityFollow
Josh Triplett, Portland State University
Jonathan Walpole, Portland State UniversityFollow

Sponsor

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-0719851.

Document Type

Technical Report

Publication Date

2-2009

Subjects

Parallel programming (Computer science) -- Evaluation, Computer multitasking

Abstract

Of the 200+ parallel-programming languages and environments created in the 1990s, almost all are now defunct. Given that parallel systems are now well within the budget of the typical hobbyist or graduate student, it is not unreasonable to expect a new cohort in excess of several thousand parallel languages and environments to appear in the 2010s. If this expected new cohort is to have more practical impact than did its 1990s counterpart, a robust and widely applicable framework will be required that encompasses exactly what, if anything, is hard about parallel programming. This paper revisits the fundamental precepts of concurrent programming to outline such a framework.

Description

Portland State University Computer Science Department Technical Report TR-09-02, 2009

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/10386

Citation Details

McKenney, Paul E., Manish Gupta, Maged M. Michael, Phil Howard, Joshua Triplett, and Jonathan Walpole. "Is Parallel Programming Hard, And If So, Why?" Technical Report Number TR-09-02, Portland State University, Computer Science Department, February 2009.