Monday, December 17, 2007

concurrency




The Free Lunch Is Over : A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software.

I once debugged a threaded, parallel version of FPC for solving the Human and Mouse genomes, and let me tell you, bugs in threaded code can be almost impossible to track down. The bugs don't happen deterministically, but probabalistically, and when you have 40 machines all updating different parts of your datastructure at different times, it becomes quite difficult to track down bugs.

We need to find better ways of doing this.

I'm thinking that Functional Programming might be a good way to do this.