The Fifth Kind of Optimisation
A little while back I wrote about what I considered to be the four main kinds of optimisation:
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However, none of this excuses the fact that I missed off a technique that, even when I wrote that post, I use frequently:
5. Use parallelisation.
Parallelism has long held promise but for a long time we couldn’t rely on hardware or programming languages when it came to parallel programming. I hope I’ve explained explain why I – and, I think, many other programmers – have consequently been afraid of exploiting parallelisation.
Nearly all those problems are now in the past and – finally! – we are starting to see somewhat widespread use of software that exploits the parallelisation potential of our hardware.