Parallel programming, once an obscure niche, is the focus of increased interest is multicore chips proliferate in ordinary PCs. A question you might well ask is whether or not computers have stopped getting faster? If you looked only at the clock speeds of microprocessor chips, you might well think so. A modern PC typically has a processor running at about 3 GHz or 3 billion clock ticks per second. However little changed from a PC maker for years ago. Clock speeds, which is to double every couple of years have stopped increasing because this chips clocked higher speeds become difficult to keep cool and much less energy efficient. Instead, an extra processing power has been added in recent years by packaging multiple processing engines will cause inside a single chip. Modern computers and laptops typically a dual core processors and some have quad core written six core chips.
You might expect a six core machine to be six times faster than a machine with a single core microprocessor. Yet the most tasks it is not. That is because nearly all software is still designed to run on single core chips, in other words it is designed to do only one thing at a time. A few pieces of special software can take advantage of multiple cores such as image processing software, for example which may divide up the task and farm about multiple cores together done faster combining the results when each chorus finished its work. In the computer's operating system may be able to assign different tasks to different cause to ensure that for example, video playback and a web browser does not slow down while hard disk is scanned for viruses. The spellchecker will not run six times faster on a six core machine and assist in specially written to share out the work between the available cause so that they can tackle the job in parallel.
When are going to have faster processors say most computer scientists including ones from the Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory in California. Instead making software run faster in the future will mean using parallel programming techniques. This will be a huge shift. At present mainstream programs written for personal computers such as wordprocessing software and specialist programs written to supercomputers with thousands of processes such as climate modelling protein folding software written using entirely different tools are images and techniques. After all, software written for one sort of machine is not expected to work on the other.
The distinction between the two is slowly breaking down. Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker has demonstrated a 48 core processor and chipset hundreds of cores seem likely within a few years. What was once an obscure academic problem such as finding ways to make easy to write software that can take full advantage of the power of parallel processing is rapidly becoming a problem for the whole industry. Unless it is solved David Smith Gartner, market research firm predicts that there will be a growing divide between computers theoretical and actual performance.
Surely this problem will be solved by some bright young entrepreneur who will devise a new panel programming language and make a fortune in the process? Alas, designing languages is not centred right path to fame and riches. Even the inventors of the successful languages are mostly unknown within the industry that alone outside it. Can you name the inventor of Cobol, C, Java or pipe and the answers are Grace Murray Hopper, Dennis Ritchie, James Gosling and Guido Van Rossum. There are thousands of programming languages and only a handful are used by more than the inventors, notes David Paterson, computer scientists at the University of California Berkely.
However, the inventions in this space that do eventually prove useful will be of enormous commercial value at some point and it will be important to protect intellectual property held in these inventions. This is why patenting these ideas and intellectual property held in them will become very important in the future.
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