{"id":182810,"date":"2007-10-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-31T10:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/bulldozers-termites-and-chainsaws-finding-a-gradual-path-to-parallelism\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T15:01:58","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T22:01:58","slug":"bulldozers-termites-and-chainsaws-finding-a-gradual-path-to-parallelism","status":"publish","type":"msr-video","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/video\/bulldozers-termites-and-chainsaws-finding-a-gradual-path-to-parallelism\/","title":{"rendered":"Bulldozers, Termites, and Chainsaws: Finding a Gradual Path to Parallelism"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>The transition to multicore is effectively a gamble that application programmers will start writing all of their code in parallel, or that workloads will change to make it simple to generate many threads.  A key question for architects is the granularity of the processors on each multicore chip \u2013 many small processors, a few medium-sized processors, or fewer large behemoths.  In this talk, I will show that with an EDGE instruction set, this choice is a false choice.  I will describe Composable Lightweight Processors, which allow larger logical processors to be synthesized out of smaller ones.  This class of architectures treats large processors as a distributed system made up of many small pieces on an on-chip micronetwork.  This approach creates the opportunity to have many intermediate design points between traditional uniprocessors and multiprocessors, blurring the distinction and permitting a more gradual path to fine-grain parallel execution than requiring full-blown parallel applications immediately.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The transition to multicore is effectively a gamble that application programmers will start writing all of their code in parallel, or that workloads will change to make it simple to generate many threads. A key question for architects is the granularity of the processors on each multicore chip \u2013 many small processors, a few medium-sized [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":194757,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr_hide_image_in_river":null,"footnotes":""},"research-area":[13560],"msr-video-type":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-session-type":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"msr-episode":[],"msr-research-theme":[],"class_list":["post-182810","msr-video","type-msr-video","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"https:\/\/youtu.be\/EsaZtqFkg9g","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_video_file":"http:\/\/0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/182810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-video"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/182810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1149681,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/182810\/revisions\/1149681"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=182810"},{"taxonomy":"msr-video-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video-type?post=182810"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=182810"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=182810"},{"taxonomy":"msr-session-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-session-type?post=182810"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=182810"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=182810"},{"taxonomy":"msr-episode","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-episode?post=182810"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-theme?post=182810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}