Be brave to use parallelism and 64-bit technology

Understanding the conservatism in the sphere of developing large program systems, we would like, though, to advise you to use those abilities which are provided by multicore 64-bit processors. It may become a large competitive advantage over similar systems and also become a good reason for news in advertisement companies.

It is senseless to delay 64-bit technology and parallelism as their mastering is inevitable. You may ignore all-round passion for a new programming language or optimizing a program for MMX technology. But you cannot avoid increase of the size of processed data and slowing down of clock frequency rise. Let’s touch upon this statemzent in detail.

Parallelism is becoming the basis of productivity rise and this is related to the slowing down of the tempo of modern microprocessors’ clock frequency rise. While the number of transistors on a dice is increasing, a sharp fall of clock frequency rise speed was outlined after 2005 (see picture 1). There is an article on this topic which is rather interesting: "The Free Lunch Is Over. A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" [1].

Picture 1. Rise of clock frequency and the number of transistors on a dice.

During last 30 years productivity has been determined by clock frequency, optimization of command execution and cache enlarging. In next years it will be determined by the number of cores. Development of parallel programming means will become the main direction of programming technologies’ development.

Parallel programming will allow not only to solve the problem of slowing down of clock frequency rise speed but in general come to creation of scalable software which will use fully the increase of number of computational nodes in the processor. That is, software will gain productivity not only through the increase of the microprocessor’s clock frequency, but through the rise of number of cores as well. Such systems are the future of software. And one who will master the new technologies quicker will be able to shift the software market for one’s own benefit.

Although the use of 64-bit technologies doesn’t look so impressive in comparison to parallelism, however, it provides a lot of new abilities too. Firstly, it is free 5-15% productivity rise. Secondly, large address space solves the problem of RAM fragmentation while working with large data sizes. The search for solution of this task has caused a lot of troubles for many developers whose programs abort because of memory shortage after several hours of work. Thirdly, this is an opportunity to easily work with data arrays of several GB. Sometimes it results in amazing rise of productivity through means of excluding access operations to the hard disk.

If all said above doesn’t convince you of advantages of 64-bit systems look closer what your colleagues or yourself are working at. Does somebody optimize code, raising the function’s productivity in 10%, although this 10% can be got by simple recompilation of a program for the 64-bit architecture? Does somebody create his own class for working with arrays, loaded from files because there is no enough space for these arrays in memory? Do you develop your own manager of memory allocation in order not to fragment memory? If you give “Yes” answer at least for one question, you should stop and think for a while. Perhaps, you fight in vain. And perhaps, it would be more profitable to spend your time on porting your application on a 64-bit system where all these questions will disappear at once. Still, sooner or later you will have to spend your time on this.

Let’s sum up all said above. It is senseless to waste time on trying to gain last profits from the 32-bit architecture. Save your time. Use parallelism and 64-bit address space to increase productivity. Give a new informational occasion and take the lead over your rivals while developing the market of high-performance applications.

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