Spreading the Word

A core belief of the STE||AR Group is that, in order to be successful in our efforts to revolutionize computing, we must garner the support and enthusiasm of the broader community. We were pleased to learn that a software engineer in Germany, Harris Brakmic,  wrote a great blog post about witting applications in HPX. One section of his post that we were very excited about was his conclusion:

HPX is a fascinating and powerful execution framework that can be used on ‘ordinary’ computers like my notebook, big clusters like Beowulf, or even on Exa-Scale hardware. The most important part, in my opinion, is the fact that one can learn everything about it on commodity hardware. Currently, there’s not much need to use a cluster at home but who knows what will be needed in a few years? Even our smartphones are already multi-core so we should at least mentally adapt to the upcoming parallelized world. The days of Free Lunch are definitely over and messing around with plain Threads and all this unwieldy ‘multithreading’ stuff aren’t gonna help us out. The sooner we begin to think ‘in parallel’ the easier we’ll adapt to the transition already happening around us.

It is great to see that people all over the world are starting to converge on the idea that massive parallelism is the path to the future. Furthermore, Harris hints that new scalable, portable, and programmable paradigms like HPX are needed to meet this challenge. These solutions are required not only for researchers working on large clusters, but also to support all sorts of technology that will touch all aspects of our everyday lives, from cell phones to the internet of things.

Read the entirety of Harris’ blog here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *