Dailydave mailing list archives
Re: Parallelism
From: "Kristian Erik Hermansen" <kristian.hermansen () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:24:20 -0700
On 10/29/07, Dave Aitel <dave () immunityinc com> wrote:
Does anyone else find it odd that Elcomsoft is getting a lot of press for something relating to cracking on video cards, when you could just write your cracker in RapidMind and be done with the whole problem? No doubt that was one of RapidMind's early test programs.
CPUshare global computing grid + JohnTheRipper == sexy https://www.cpushare.com/wiki/cpushare/JohnTheRipper
In any case, it's interesting that Linux Journal and MSDN Magazine are both focused on parallelism lately. Both of them are a bit "off" in my opinion. The answer is going to be a language that abstracts data access that extra layer to make parallelism something your compiler does for you. It's not going to be parallel additions to already non-parallel languages. You have to love the "caveats" in MSDN Magazine about using "Only one parallel loop at a time". And also "Parallel exceptions in LINQ are non-deterministic"! Imagine the hilarious security side effects from these sorts of half-backed parallel solutions.
You are right. Most developers can't even prevent simple bugs in their programs, let alone think about parallelism as well. What I find more interesting is that people always love their faster multi-core CPUs, but let's say you have a Quad Core with a single-threaded app ... "oh damn!!! I just increased the running time of this app by 4x over a single core CPU". So, in general, multi-core CPUs actually make a lot of code 'less-efficient'. I believe that the Intel compiler (icc) has some of this optimization for multi-core built in, but it has not trickled down to the open source compilers like gcc/g++ yet. Even still, it is not a simple problem to solve, and in fact, this was a topic of discussion for some time at various points in history going back at least 15 years. When I spoke at the Ubuntu Live conference last summer, there was a guy from Intel there talking about the problem and their new open source tool Threading Building Blocks (TBB). Links below... http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/08/03/ars-at-ubuntu-live-intels-tbb-announcement-party http://www.ubuntulive.com/cs/ubuntu/view/e_sess/13467 The presentation file: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/presentations/ubuntu2007/ul_reinders.pdf -- Kristian Erik Hermansen _______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list Dailydave () lists immunitysec com http://lists.immunitysec.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
Current thread:
- Parallelism Dave Aitel (Oct 29)
- Re: Parallelism Curt (Oct 29)
- Re: Parallelism Florian Weimer (Oct 29)
- Re: Parallelism Stephen John Smoogen (Oct 29)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Parallelism Kristian Erik Hermansen (Oct 29)