FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, European Editor Dick Selwood has a fascinating interview with one of the pioneers of parallel processing - Iann Barron. Barron was one of the founders of INMOS and one of the chief architects of the INMOS Transputer – arguably the earliest attempt to implement a multi-processor architecture in an integrated circuit. With today’s explosion of multi-core and multi-processor architectures in the embedded world – Barron’s 30-year insight into the problems of parallel computing is thought-provoking. Did he really tell Embedded Technology Journal that early parallel processing failed, in part, because the developers were trying to do too many things at the same time? Yes, he did.
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Kevin
Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal
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Parallel Processing Considered Not Harmful
by Dick Selwood, Embedded Technology Journal
Parallel processing has long been held to be the way to achieve high processing throughput at a reasonable cost. Yet there are still few generally available systems, and it is seen as being difficult to do. European Editor Dick Selwood spoke to the pioneer of parallel processing, Iann Barron, about the issues.
Thirty years ago Iann Barron was one of the founders of the British semiconductor company, INMOS. The company was set up for several reasons, but one of them was to commercialise parallel processing, using a specialised device called the transputer. Inmos has now disappeared, the remains of its technology being held by ST, but its legacy is still around in many different companies and in a general acceptance of parallel processing.
In an ideal parallel processing environment, tasks are spread across an array of processors, and adding more processors increases the performance. For some applications, the array can carry out the same instruction at the same time (Single Instruction, Multiple Data - SIMD), rather like soldiers drilling. However, most applications in the real world require Multiple Instructions, Multiple Data (MIMD), where each processor is carrying out an individual task and communicating with other processors as needed. It is this that is the target of much work on parallelism, and it is implementing software to run on these systems that is seen as the barrier to widespread adoption of parallel processing systems. [more]
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