I think a major problem there are many parallel-programming models , which either do not make big news outside the academic world, or are deemed not suitable

I think a major problem there are many parallel-programming models , which either do not make big news outside the academic world, or are deemed not suitable for industry(CUDA folks- not talking about you!). Like Matt Welsh(the Harvard prof who left for Google) mentioned on his blog recently.. how many people risk running OpenMP in production, and watch some nodes fail.. Even the "Big" guys (Google,Facebook) seem to be risk-aversed to thread-level parallelism to earn their bread -BigTable,Hadoop,Cassandra are centered on multi- process architecture.. and basically built for horizontal scaling- add more nodes,assume they fail. Where is this push towards parallel machines coming from? Not really from consumer web - Or any consumer oriented service that an entrepreneur can gain value, by utilizing multi-processor systems. It's the organizations with big bucks that call the shots, or drive innovation. Like NCEP/NOAA in weather prediction. Not the guy who moves to the Bay area who wants to hack something, get traction in user base, get funding,and finally mint money :-) The demand for writing consumer facing software for multi-processor systems is simply too less now.