Deep Inside Rochester

The title of this post came from a statement made by Frank Soltis in a recent article in TECHWORLD called "Q&A: Power chip inventor speaks out". What Frank actually said is this:

Today, most ISV-developed applications for the System i5 are multithreaded parallel applications.

Although I agree with Frank that "the System i5 and its predecessors have always been designed to run multiple applications in parallel," I don't agree that most ISV-developed applications are multithreaded, particularly because the use of threads in RPG is not prevalent.

However, will this statement become true eventually? Today's operating systems and ISVs will be pressured to fully exploit the capabilities of the compute power present in multi-core systems, driving the software industry towards greater use of multi-threading. In the article, Frank goes on to say that "writing parallel applications will in the future be the only way to get increased performance. There are some tools that can help, but much of the effort will come back to the way in which programmers design their applications." Yes, I think frank has identified a trend.

Btw, Frank works out of Rochester, Minnesota, not Rochester, Minneapolis as asserted in the article.

# posted by Bob Donovan @ 1:32 PM