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Given that the sustainability of Intel's profit margins are dependent on it, I am surprised they do not put more effort into making parallel programming easier.

Given that the sustainability of Intel's profit margins are dependent on it, I am surprised they do not put more effort into making parallel programming easier. For example, GHC Haskell has a very promising parallelism/concurrency story with its many available programming models, including software transactional memory and lightweight threads, yet it is Microsoft funding it and not Intel.

Athas 9y ago
Intel Labs did do some work on functional language implementation, including a Haskell compiler (backend): https://github.com/IntelLabs/flrc https://github.com/IntelLabs/flrc I think the focus was on vectorisation rather than task parallelism, though. And it's been abandoned for years. I'm not sure Intel's sustainability is uniquely dependent on parallel programming. In fact, given that Intel processors have the best sequential performance, one could even argue that it's to their advantage that parallel programming remains awkward.
vilya 9y ago
Maybe the effort just isn't where you're looking? Intel provides the Threading Building Blocks library for C++; some top notch debugging & profiling tools with multi-threading support; very good documentation; and they do quite a bit of community outreach to educate about and promote multi-threaded programming. (I'm not affiliated with them, just grateful for all of that stuff!)
- willtim 9y ago
  I'm aware of TBB, but IMHO C++ is not the future of parallel and concurrent programming, or at least not the future I am hoping for.
  - CyberDildonics 9y ago
    What is one example of haskell being used effectively for parallel execution in a real world scenario?
    - willtim 9y ago
      Haskell is used for critical projects in production at Standard Chartered, Barclays and Facebook. There are also numerous startups. For both parallelism and concurrency, Haskell has a particularly good story. There's now even an O'Reilly book: "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell" http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000929/index.html http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000929/index.ht...
s_ngularity 9y ago
They are working on a Xeon-optimized version of Torch (https://github.com/intel/torch https://github.com/intel/torch), presumably in an attempt to get more of the deep-learning community onto Intel hardware

Athas 9y ago

Intel Labs did do some work on functional language implementation, including a Haskell compiler (backend): https://github.com/IntelLabs/flrc https://github.com/IntelLabs/flrc I think the focus was on vectorisation rather than task parallelism, though. And it's been abandoned for years. I'm not sure Intel's sustainability is uniquely dependent on parallel programming. In fact, given that Intel processors have the best sequential performance, one could even argue that it's to their advantage that parallel programming remains awkward.

vilya 9y ago

Maybe the effort just isn't where you're looking? Intel provides the Threading Building Blocks library for C++; some top notch debugging & profiling tools with multi-threading support; very good documentation; and they do quite a bit of community outreach to educate about and promote multi-threaded programming. (I'm not affiliated with them, just grateful for all of that stuff!)

willtim 9y ago
I'm aware of TBB, but IMHO C++ is not the future of parallel and concurrent programming, or at least not the future I am hoping for.
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
  What is one example of haskell being used effectively for parallel execution in a real world scenario?
  - willtim 9y ago
    Haskell is used for critical projects in production at Standard Chartered, Barclays and Facebook. There are also numerous startups. For both parallelism and concurrency, Haskell has a particularly good story. There's now even an O'Reilly book: "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell" http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000929/index.html http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000929/index.ht...

s_ngularity 9y ago

They are working on a Xeon-optimized version of Torch (https://github.com/intel/torch https://github.com/intel/torch), presumably in an attempt to get more of the deep-learning community onto Intel hardware