Parallel processing is one of the hot topics in computing these days, so I’m always interested when a major tools vendor introduces a new technology designed to make parallelisation and concurrency simpler for the lay programmer. Most recently, Apple finalised the APIs for Grand Central this week, coinciding with the latest development build of its forthcoming Snow Leopard edition of Mac OS X.
Grand Central is a new set of technologies that bakes concurrency into the heart of Mac OS X. They’re designed to make it easier for programmers to divide their applications into separate, atomic processing tasks, each of which can then be handed off to the OS for efficient distribution across multiple CPU cores. With Grand Central, the OS itself handles much of the low-level grunt work of supervising and routing independent tasks, freeing programmers to concentrate on user-facing issues.
This kind of assistive technology will be essential if developers hope to take full advantage of the next generation of high-performance CPUs. Cores have replaced clock speed as the new metric for processor power. If you think it’s challenging to write code that runs efficiently on today’s four- and eight-core systems, just wait until the average desktop PC contains 16 or 32 cores, or more.
Still, I can’t help but wonder whether the industry as a whole might be running in the wrong direction. Despite years of research into grid processing and HPC (high-performance computing), efficient parallelization remains a tough nut to crack. The systems that do it well are mainly purpose-built environments that are poorly suited to the needs of your average PC user.
So why not just have those systems do what they do best and leave our PCs to handle user experience and interactivity? In other words, why are we trying to re-create Google-style parallelism on our desktops when we could just have Google handle the heavy lifting for us?
NEXT: Apple’s concurrency tools won’t change the world
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Comments received
Richard Stelling said on Fri, 15 May 2009
Grand Central will allow mortal programmers access to the GPU, and that 'll speed up MP3 encoding.
Also CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation and OpenGL will benefit and so will any application using them.
Not such damp squib.
John Crawford said on Fri, 15 May 2009
Thanks, Richard.
I felt sure the author had overlooked some areas of benefit available to mere mortals.
BJ said on Fri, 15 May 2009
Still not DirectX 10 textures, but a start.
aToMac said on Fri, 15 May 2009
Also web applications aren't concurrent.
Yes, they are for multiple sessions. But what if there are 32 cores on the server and only two clients are requesting a complex calculation? 30 cores will be idling, unless the calculation can be calculated concurrently. Each user will have 16 cores for his calculation.
Concurrent is the way to go. Programmers must learn to write concurrent, Thread-safe code.
Rob said on Fri, 15 May 2009
Where have you been for the last 20 years Neil? We had these problems in 1990 with the Transputer and it all worked out beautifully until the British Government killed INMOS and sold the company to the French. And thinking single threaded apps are the norm - what are you, a windows programmer? Multi-threaded Unix apps are hardly new tech or indeed rocket science!
Terry said on Fri, 15 May 2009
Computers will never need more than 128k of ram. Thats pretty much the argument here.
Geekmoose said on Tue, 19 May 2009
Yeah, GrandCentral will be awful. After all, it's not like the operating system itself would benefit from multiple cores. Now supposing you had an application that rendered live previews of your files as their icons, or had a service that indexed your hard disks, or perhaps something that did some really funky window manipulations. Then you might need something like that, but most users of os x 10.5 won't need such things.
Then there is the hardware, most of the new computers would need a 'real' graphics chip to benefit- shame the only computers in apples line up with a dedicated graphics chip are the iMac, the macbook pro, the macbook, and the mac mini.
In short the author has not got a flipping clue what the hell he is on about. I can't believe that tech news is so slow that Macworld has to put out such utter tripe.
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