Parallel Computing

Paul Graham, in his by now famous "The Hundred Year Language" keynote at Pycon 2003, questions the future of parallel computing. I am a little more optimistic than he is, see if you agree...

I expect that, as with the stupendous speed of the underlying hardware, parallelism will be something that is available if you ask for it explicitly, but ordinarily not used.

In a hundred years I expect languages to express opportunities for parallelism better than they do today. I expect language compilers to plan for parallelism more than programmers using those languages.

I would use pH as an example of where this could go more maintstream.

This implies that the kind of parallelism we have in a hundred years will not, except in special applications, be massive parallelism. I expect for ordinary programmers it will be more like being able to fork off processes that all end up running in parallel.

• Certainly programming over the next five years, not to mention a hundred, will be more event driven and concurrent.
• Languages like pH, mentioned above, will enable some of these concurrent processes to have some implicitly parallel computations.
• Other set-oriented languages like SQL (ignoring sequential stored procedures) also imply parallel computation.
• The Teradata DB architecture is already parallel and performs best on set-oriented SQL.
• As concurrent hardware becomes significantly more affordable we will see parallel implementations of open source databases for OLAP-oriented analysis.

Except in special kinds of applications, parallelism won't pervade the programs that are written in a hundred years. It would be premature optimization if it did.

On the contrary I think we'll be accustomed to parallel and concurrent computing through the use of simpler mechanisms that we have today, by and large.

• OLTP computing will take place through event-driven concurrent processes coordinated by simple message exchange patterns using simple "autonomic meeting places".
• OLAP computing will take place through simple notations with mostly implicit parallel capabilities.
• Inherently parallel structures in either of these scenarios will also take place through simple notations and a compiler's parallel planning capability analgous to a SQL compiler's query planning component.

So there will be much more parallel computing than we have today, but it will be simpler and mostly implicit. I think Paul Graham's OLTP/Workflow orientation is blinding him to the amount of analysis that takes place in the business world, and how much more can be automated in the next hundred years.