The Zen of Parallel Programming: Coordinating Power Within and Without
Reading An Introduction to Parallel Programming, I see a deep link between processor communication and human inner life. Adding more power doesn't solve problems; we must learn to coordinate what we have. Just as processors must synchronize to avoid contention, our thoughts, emotions, and bodies need honest communication. When they work together, we avoid burnout. The challenge is not a lack of resources, but power divided against itself.
Maybe our greatest limitation is not a lack of power, but power divided against itself.
- torginus
I cannot make sense of a single word of this essay. What sort of insight am I missing? There's not a peep here about write barriers, futexes, OS schedulers, critical paths and/or how they relate to Zen or whatever. This article can be easily recycled as the Zen of compiler design or Zen of audio engineering or whatever, without substantially having to chance much of the words, thats how generic it is.
I'm genuinely considering that this is just a foreword and I missed the clickthrough link to the meat of the article.
- alexpotato
Best quote over on distributed systems as applied to humans (from Dan Luu):
"Everything we've looked at so far is a technical problem. Compared to organizational problems, technical problems are straightforward. Distributed systems are considered hard because real systems might drop something like 0.1% of messages, corrupt an even smaller percentage of messages, and see latencies in the microsecond to millisecond range. When I talk to higher-ups and compare what they think they're saying to what my coworkers think they're saying, I find that the rate of lost messages is well over 50%, every message gets corrupted, and latency can be months or years"
- datadrivenangel
Fred Brooks and the mythical man month observed that communication between people expands faster than linear, and that adding more people to a project makes it later.
- baud9600
It’s true that “zen of” is bolted onto many topics… it’s a tired cliche to suggest “simplicity” when things are complex. Does it help or is it faux spirituality?
I’ve enjoyed reading the comments here and I think there’s truth in how the technical problem is divided and teams are arranged. The idea of frequency of features (or builds) being a reflection of our division of the problem, is interesting. It made me think about our teams trying to ship releases and the problems arising, but zen and parallelism don’t give any hints. It’s just about effort to organise better, like it always was
- SuperNinKenDo
I appreciate somebody trying to connect disparate concepts to give both some kind of fresh perspective; perfectly happy to entertain analogies that break down if you look at them too hard... but like somebody else said, this reads like a draft or a foreword. Also, what about any of this is "zen"? This goes nowhere and has no connection with the concepts put forward in the title. Chucking "the zen of" in front of anything for no reason was tired 10 years ago, yet people keep doing it. We get it, you've heard of the book.