[Dailydave] Parallelism

[Curt]

I don't find it odd that they're getting the press.  Sure, RapidMind
is good stuff, and really lowers the bar for parallel programming, but
hand tuned programs will still be faster, just slower to develop.
What I do find odd is that Elcomsoft actually applied for a patent on
it.  I mean, you have Lavalys who has a program called EVEREST that
does "aes multi-threaded benchmark" and supports nVidia cards.  And
there are many others who have crypto projects on video hardware.  You
even have PureVideoHD by nVidia that supports AES on their own
hardware!  There will be plenty of prior art to void the patent.
Maybe they applied for the patent simply for the publicity that it
would generate?  Yeah, I think that's it.  Why else would they
announce to the press that they have "applied for" instead of wait
until they actually got it?

--Curt


On 10/29/07, Dave Aitel <dave at immunityinc.com> wrote:
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> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> - -dave
>
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