“Is Parallel Programming Hard, and, If So, What Can You Do About It?” v2 Is Out

The hardest part of parallel programming is tricking yourself into believing you need to worry about it at all. 9/10 times, if you use the right tools & techniques, a single x86 core (assuming you have access to a 'real' one) can easily chew through millions of business transactions per second and easily satisfy all technical requirements for whatever business system. Latency is the ultimate devil. Getting your synchronous state to fit into L1/2 and processing transactions in (micro)batches of…

I see a lot of confusion between parallel programming [1] and concurrent programming [2] in the comments here. The former and what this book is about deals with the problem of parallelizaing a single sequential program. There usually is strong interaction or dependencies between elements and progress needs synchronization. E.g. timestep iterations in real-time simulations that need synchronization with data communication after each timestep. These simulation also tend to get way to big to be run on a single…