New Programming Models

Intel senior fellow Justin R. Rattner believes, after being largely ignored by the market, the time has come for parallel and distributed processing. Rattner says microprocessor speeds will only be capable of modest growth, as power conservation has become such an important issue. The inability to improve microprocessor speed will give rise to multicore and many-core processors, which will require a new generation of programming tools. "Given the rudimentary state of parallel software, the investment across the entire computing industry will be very large," Rattner says. "Retraining existing programmers and educating a new generation of developers coming out of school is another formidable challenge. It will take years, if not decades, to reach the point where virtually all programmers assume the default programming model is parallel rather than serial." Rattner predicts that in five years all new software will be written for multicore processors, though a lot of existing software such as work processors will not need to be rewritten. Rattner says hundreds of universities worldwide are reintroducing parallel programming in their curricula, and Intel and other companies are working on funding programs to restart academic research in parallel programming and architectures.