5 ms·

I think if the simulation is deterministic it's parallel, if it's OK with not being deterministic then it's concurrent; I'd fight to keep it parallel and not co

by _yosefk 13y ago

I think if the simulation is deterministic it's parallel, if it's OK with not being deterministic then it's concurrent; I'd fight to keep it parallel and not concurrent, but I don't know how hard it is, maybe in some cases you can't realistically win the battle. I very much think it's valuable to treat distributed, parallel systems specially and not just use concurrency-oriented tools - it's better to exploit determinism for automated debugging, it's just not my area at the moment - I work more on shared-memory systems. I was involved in some work with parallelizing on multiple boxes at process granularity, but it wasn't elaborate enough to go deeply into any of these issues.

micro_cam 13y ago
Things definitely get messy in scientific computing. It is common to have algorithms that are stochastic for other reasons. I'm working on a parallel random forest implementation at the moment...very little communication between threads is needed but the algorithm itself is stochastic (unless you seed your random number generators in a clever way i guess). (And I've use go's concurrency primitives and race tool for things like writing the forest to disk as trees are grown in parallel and compiling summary statistics). I do think that tools like the one you are writing are very useful and needed. I just have a bad habit of wanting everything to meet my needs.