Oren Eini

aka Ayende Rahien

Oren Eini

CEO of RavenDB

a NoSQL Open Source Document Database

Get in touch with me:

oren@ravendb.net +972 52-548-6969

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RavenDB Workshops - Deep dive into practical use of Document Data Modeling
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Jun 13 2009

The fallacies of parallel computing

time to read 1 min | 25 words

Notes from alt.net parallel session.

  • Locality doesn't matter
  • Locks / syncronization are cheap
  • Higher parallelism equates to faster code
  • All actors see the same state
  • Parallel programming is easy
Tweet Share Share 19 comments
Tags:
  • ALT.NET

  previous post next post  

Comments

configurator
13 Jun 2009
21:53 PM
configurator

Maybe some formatting would do this post some good?

Ayende Rahien
13 Jun 2009
22:14 PM
Ayende Rahien

fixed

Luis Abreu
13 Jun 2009
22:37 PM
Luis Abreu

hum? wtf? serious? is that session live? who was the speaker?

Peter Morris
13 Jun 2009
23:02 PM
Peter Morris

And if you believe this, I have a car you might like to buy...

Ayende Rahien
14 Jun 2009
06:29 AM
Ayende Rahien

Peter,

did you see the fallacies in there?

Alex Yakunin
14 Jun 2009
08:49 AM
Alex Yakunin

Either the authior has screwed up... Or there is some misunderstanding. May be the author was talking about his own, rather special case?

Luis Abreu
14 Jun 2009
13:16 PM
Luis Abreu

well, that's why I asked for more info on that session...without context, it's wrong and that's why I'm curious in understanding why he said all that...

Neal Blomfield
14 Jun 2009
20:09 PM
Neal Blomfield

I understand points 2 and 5 (at least in the broadest sense).

With respect to point 3, are you referring to the overheads introduced by synchronisation and management of the parallel workstreams (meaning that parallelism is only faster if the workload meets certain criteria)?

I am unsure what you mean when you refer to locality and would be curious to see more about that and all actors seeing the same state discussed further.

Luis Abreu
14 Jun 2009
20:36 PM
Luis Abreu

Well, I'm not sure I understand 2. locks (and I'm assuming we're talking about .NET locks) are cheap only when they don't end up waiting on the a kernel object (which isn't guaranteed). When that happens, you'll incur into kernel transitions and those are expensive. btw, in .NET, locking means that you will always spin lock for some predefined time and this might not be good (image you're in a plane in a laptop...is spinning a good option?).

5 couldn't be wrong...if things can go wrong in a sequential program, then you can be sure that there are much more things that can (and probably will) go wrong.

locality is an interesting and complex topic : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference

Luis Abreu
14 Jun 2009
20:36 PM
Luis Abreu

btw, in the previous entry, it should have been "5 couldn't be more wrong"

configurator
14 Jun 2009
20:44 PM
configurator

What have the all links in your feed suddenly changed just now to links such as feedproxy.google.com/.../...arallel-computing.aspx which forward to your actual blog? Are you aware of that?

me
14 Jun 2009
22:05 PM
me

I think you meant 'Phalluses' or 'Fallacies'.

Ayende Rahien
14 Jun 2009
22:31 PM
Ayende Rahien

me,

Yes, sorry, blogging from the iPhone doesn't really works.

configurator
14 Jun 2009
22:41 PM
configurator

@me, I doubt he meant phalluses.

Of course, I could be wrong :)

Fabio Margarito
17 Jun 2009
16:24 PM
Fabio Margarito

I know that's the wrong post to ask you about one thing, but lets go. I am included in one group about architecture best pratices ( groups.google.com/.../b8a4caaf0ab44e53) and at this week one discussion started. It's about databases primary keys and composed key and dificulties using that ones with ORMs. Several members prefer just one key in the table and that's keys like artificial keys, others doen'st open hand of having a well ER modeling. What you think about?

Ayende Rahien
18 Jun 2009
04:22 AM
Ayende Rahien

Use surrogate keys

Ayende Rahien
22 Jun 2009
03:24 AM
Ayende Rahien

Nearl,

With 3 I usually refer to some people thinking about optimization with "let us parallelize that", which is not always (or often) a good idea

Kyle Szklenski
22 Jun 2009
13:38 PM
Kyle Szklenski

I love when people attempt to parallelize domains which are inherently not parallel. For example, a former boss of mine had an app that had as many as 30 threads running at a time, only one of which was necessary. It was written in extremely old, terrible C code, and the compilers/debuggers that they used there couldn't even handle the threading issues that came up (just too many threads).

free poker web site
11 Jul 2009
09:36 AM
free poker web site

I like some of Lanier's ideas. I wrote a short news article about one of his ideas a couple of years ago. I can't say I am too fond of Minsky' work. Minsky is from last century's school of symbolic artificial intelligence, which I believe to be complete crackpottery.

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