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Home/Magazine Archive/May 2015 (Vol. 58, No. 5)/Technical Perspective: Programming Multicore Computers/Abstract

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Technical Perspective: Programming Multicore Computers

By James Larus
Communications of the ACM, May 2015, Vol. 58 No. 5, Page 76
10.1145/2742908
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What is the best way to program a parallel computer? Common answers are to have a compiler transform a sequential program into a parallel one or to write a parallel program using a parallel language or library.

In the early days of parallel computers, parallelizing compilers offered the tantalizing promise of running unmodified "dusty deck" sequential FORTRAN programs on the emerging parallel computers. Although research on these compilers led to many program analysis and representation innovations used in modern compilers, the resulting tools were not successful at parallelizing most applications, and developers turned instead to libraries such as pthreads and MPI.

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