[webkit-dev] Parallel JavaScript: Why a separate ParallelArray types

[Dirk Pranke]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Filip Pizlo <fpizlo at apple.com> wrote:

> I'm curious: would you want to use ParallelArray, if you had the
> flexibility of building a different abstraction?
>
> I find ParallelArray to be an awkward abstraction to begin with.  I like
> work queues and such.  The whole idea that the only parallelism you get is
> from arrays feels narrow-minded.
>

I think the needs of the HPC / GPU-accelerating crowd are quite different
from the people looking for general concurrency solutions to the multi-core
problem.

For what it's worth, NRWT is (IMO) an interesting example of a
highly-parallel program. In a sense, the problem is perfectly suited to
map/reduce, and the performance of NRWT scales linearly well up to (at
least) 48-core machines; the necessarily-serial part of the program is
quite small. However, in order to turn it into a usable program (where you
can actually tell what's going on and manage it well), you do need to
actually monitor tasks and queues and provide problem-specific feedback to
the user. I'm not sure what the message of that is, exactly ...

-- Dirk
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