"Simultaneous" Considered Harmful: Modular Parallelism

The dominant view of computing is  based on sequential processing as the “normal” case, with parallelism considered to be optional “acceleration.” In this position paper, we argue that parallel is becoming the norm, so we must re-examine the primacy of serialized computations in time, simultaneous action-at-a-distance, and total ordering in our thinking and our engineering practices.

We focus in this paper on some of these problematic ideas, design, and implementation structures that must be deprecated, and cleaner modularity concepts supported, if we in the systems part of the computing community are to unshackle parallel computing from its misplaced entanglement to a sequential model of computing.  In the end, ours is a call to action, not revolutionary action that discards the past, but rapid evolutionary change, abandoning obsolete ideas.