Are you concerned about multicore? [closed]

Answer 1

I'm not worried. The concepts aren't too difficult and more developers writing multithreaded apps = more material on the subject = easier to figure out what you need to.

Answer 2

Dataflow programming shows some promise for a relatively easy solution to the multicore problem.

As wikipedia says, though, it requires a fairly major paradigm shift, which seems to prevent its easy adoption by the programming community.

Answer 3

No way! I'm a Clojure programmer! :D

Answer 4

I think this is generally worth taking an interest in, to put it mildly.

It hardly needs saying that the massive increase in speed of CPUs over the past few decades has been extremely valuable, and that further gains will be just as valuable.

But those gains will from now on mostly consist of a regular doubling in the number of cores. So to benefit from these gains, software needs to be parallelizable.

A lot of the computation-intensive parts of many applications are actually written in SQL, so they are already functional and capable of being broken down into parallel tasks by the RDBMS. So those people can relax.

But those of us writing mostly in C#, even if we're writing GUIs, we need to pay close attention to this stuff. A GUI frequently has to perform some useful operation on whatever model it presents to the user, and the user gets annoyed when they have to sit and wait for it to finish. They'll get even more annoyed in a few years time, when they look at Task Manager and see that around 3% of their fancy new 32-core machine is being utilized.

Answer 5

Well, since I do web development in ASP.Net, there are a few areas I could see multicore playing a role:

1) Client-side. How can something like Javascript be optimized for the client that has a quad-core CPU if that is what someone wants to harness in running something like sorting a long list of data. Are fat-clients coming back with the new versions of IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome?

2) Server-side on a web server. Within IIS and the .Net framework that it uses, how do things like PLINQ help use parallel or concurrent programming to help speed up handling requests? What kinds of IIS settings can be done to enhance performance and tune it to the hardware?

3) Middleware/DB Back-end. How does the latest MS-SQL Server or Oracle or MySQL handle using the additional resources of both multi-core and multi-socket, e.g. if a quad-socket motherboard has quad core CPUs in each socket and something like Hyperthreading on top there are 32 threads that could run at once which is really different than a single core CPU back in the days.

In addition, there is something to be said for the multicore aspects of GPUs where Crossfire and SLI were the beginning but now there are more hybrid graphics solutions that one can wonder how this will be harnessed in the future, e.g. AMD's Fusion is one idea that I'm not sure how well it'll do but it is coming last I heard.

On the subject of educating myself, I'm not sure how hard would optimizing my code would help in some cases. I'm more interested in how will IIS try to harness the new computing realm before it as that could ultimately be limiting some things that can be done, even if I isolate my code to run in its own little world.

These are just my current thoughts and are subject to change at any moment.

Answer 6

As an indie game developer I'm actually very excited about it. Several games go CPU bound during active moments. And almost all modern 3D games are very taxing on the hardware. Multicore has been the law of the land for video for the past several years. With some nvidia cards nowadays having over 200 cores.

Writing shaders for these cards is a pleasure, and I can't wait to see what comes out of more and more machines being multi-proc.

I think this need will spawn better threading support over time. We still have crazy schemes like apaches MPM-Worker model where you get a mix of several processes and threads at the same time. I'd like to see better adoption of things like green-threads, where they seem to all be in the same process, but are actually distributed over cores. But of course someone will have to have some breakthrough idea with shared memory to pull that off.

Near term: It's not a big deal unless you're crushing your processor Long term: Better get comfy with locks :)