Lambda the Ultimate

Peter J. Denning and Jack B. Dennis, The Resurgence of Parallelism, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 53 No. 6, Pages 30-32, 10.1145/1743546.1743560

"Multi-core chips are a new paradigm!" "We are entering the age of parallelism!" These are today's faddish rallying cries for new lines of research and commercial development. ... The parallel architecture research of the 1960s and 1970s solved many problems that are being encountered today. Our objective in this column is to recall the most important of these results and urge their resurrection.

A brief but timely reminder that we should avoid reinventing the wheel. Denning and Dennis give a nice capsule summary of the history of parallel computing research, and highlight some of the key ideas that came out of earlier research on parallel computing. This isn't a technically deep article. But it gives a quick overview of the field, and tries to identify some of the things that actually are research challenges rather than problems for which the solutions have seemingly been forgotten.