HPPC 2010:5th Workshop on highly parallel processing on a chip

Despite the processor industry having more or less successfully invested already 10 years to develop better and increasingly parallel multicore architectures, both software community and educational institutions appear still to rely on the sequential computing paradigm as the primary mechanism for expressing the (very often originally inherently parallel) functionality, especially in the arena of general purpose computing. In that respect, parallel programming has remained a hobby of highly educated specialists and is still too often being considered as too difficult for the average programmer. Excuses are various: lack of education, lack of suitable easy-to-use tools, too architecture-dependent mechanisms, huge existing base of sequential legacy code, steep learning curves, and inefficient architectures. It is important for the scientific community to analyze the situation and understand whether the problem is with hardware architectures, software development tools and practices, or both. Although we would be tempted to answer this question (and actually try to do so elsewhere), there is strong need for wider academic discussion on these topics and presentation of research results in scientific workshops and conferences