Parallel Programming

Vol. 12 No. 9 – September 2014

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Parallel Programming

Port Squatting:
Don’t irk your local sysadmin.

Dear KV, A few years ago you upbraided some developers for not following the correct process when requesting a reserved network port from IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). While I get that squatting a used port is poor practice, I wonder if you, yourself, have ever tried to get IETF to allocate a port. We recently went through this with a new protocol on an open-source project, and it was a nontrivial and frustrating exercise. While I wouldn’t encourage your readers to squat ports, I can see why they might just look for unallocated ports on their own and simply start using those, with the expectation that if their protocols proved popular, they would be granted the allocations later.

by George Neville-Neil

Productivity in Parallel Programming: A Decade of Progress:
Looking at the design and benefits of X10

In 2002 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) launched a major initiative in HPCS (high-productivity computing systems). The program was motivated by the belief that the utilization of the coming generation of parallel machines was gated by the difficulty of writing, debugging, tuning, and maintaining software at peta scale.

by John T. Richards, Jonathan Brezin, Calvin B. Swart, Christine A. Halverson

JavaScript and the Netflix User Interface:
Conditional dependency resolution

In the two decades since its introduction, JavaScript has become the de facto official language of the Web. JavaScript trumps every other language when it comes to the number of runtime environments in the wild. Nearly every consumer hardware device on the market today supports the language in some way. While this is done most commonly through the integration of a Web browser application, many devices now also support Web views natively as part of the operating system UI (user interface). Across most platforms (phones, tablets, TVs, and game consoles), the Netflix UI, for example, is written almost entirely in JavaScript.

by Alex Liu

Evolution of the Product Manager:
Better education needed to develop the discipline

Software practitioners know that product management is a key piece of software development. Product managers talk to users to help figure out what to build, define requirements, and write functional specifications. They work closely with engineers throughout the process of building software. They serve as a sounding board for ideas, help balance the schedule when technical challenges occur - and push back to executive teams when technical revisions are needed. Product managers are involved from before the first code is written, until after it goes out the door.

by Ellen Chisa