Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Is anyone here interested in the "Future of Apple //?"
Message-ID: <9323@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 10 Jan 89 02:44:28 GMT
References: <5678@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <1209@umbio.MIAMI.EDU>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 17

In article <1209@umbio.MIAMI.EDU> dnelson@umbio.MIAMI.EDU (Dru Nelson) writes:
>I like your idea about going parallel.  I don't like the tools much,
>But if we had a linda tool we could add many more processors and
>really make it zoom.  The next step would be to get the developers to
>take advantage... really take advantage of it.

It may come as a surprise to people who haven't had experience using
parallel processing, but it is hard to exploit multiple concurrent
processors in a reliable, controlled manner.  For a handful of CPUs,
probably the best way to use them is in support of a mutiprocessing
environment such as UNIX.  There are several "superminis" like this,
and they do make good use of concurrent CPUs without causing
programming nightmares.  Developing applications for which the
parallelism is explicitly visible is a mistake, except in certain
specialized cases (for example, we perform parallel ray tracing on
our systems that provide concurrency support, reverting to single-
thread ray tracing on other systems).