Comment Re:No locks (Score 1) 449
>Also, some problems can't be done in parallel, but we won't know how many can until we start trying....and then try for a few decades.
Right, but there's also a grey area between completely serializable and embarassingly parallel, in which methods like this will allow scaling algorithms up from "a few" computation nodes to "many", with the optimal numbers depending on the specific algorithms.
The biggest problems are still the same ones that existed when I got my Master's over a decade ago. Language support for parallelism isn't very good (I personally used MPI, which was awkwardly bolted on top of C++), it requires a certain amount of specialized knowledge to write parallel code that doesn't break or deadlock your machine (and writing optimized code is a bit more advanced than that), and library calls aren't all threadsafe. On the plus side, a lot of frameworks and libraries are now multithreaded by default, which nicely isolates the problems of parallel computing away from people who haven't been trained in it, and gives the benefits of parallel computing with only the downside of having to use a framework. =)