Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on December 6, 2014 1:25 pm wrote:
> Eric Bron (eric.bron.delete@this.zvisuel.privatefortest.com) on December 6, 2014 2:42 am wrote:
> >
> > or people using DAGs to explain why reference count is a solid
> > solution when complex object graphs typically have cycles
>
> Oh, I agree. My example was the simple case. The really complex cases are much worse.
>
> I seriously don't believe that the future is parallel. People who think you can solve it with compilers
> or programming languages (or better programmers) are so far out to lunch that it's not even funny.
>
> Parallelism works well in simplified cases with fairly clear interfaces and models. You find
> parallelism in servers with independent queries, in HPC, in kernels, in databases. And even
> there, people work really hard to make it work at all, and tend to expressly limit their models
> to be more amenable to it (eg databases do some things much better than others, so DB admins
> make sure that they lay out their data in order to cater to the limitations).
>
> Of course, other programming models can work. Neural networks are inherently very
> parallel indeed. And you don't need smarter programmers to program them either..
>
> Linus

Maybe this will change if we ever have large quantities of reasonably fast nvram. I think search problems in language or visual recognition should be quite amenable to parallelism, but they probably have huge working sets which would take too much memory, energy, and loading time to access.