Stick a fork() in It: Parallel and Distributed Perl

Parallelism appears throughout the history of computing, yet many programmers have been caught off-guard by the proliferation of multicore systems. Luckily, Perl and Unix provide lots of tools for leveraging multicore or multinode environments. Let’s quit spoon-feeding the computer one byte at a time and get out our fork()s.

Appetizer: The basic models and concepts of parallelization via a brief history of parallel computing followed by a few fun facts about spaceships, Unix, and Ahmdal’s law.

Main course: Armed with these fundamentals, we’ll then study a few compact examples of turning sequential problems into parallel ones. We’ll find ways to bend or break the rules and see how parallelism changes some of the old assumptions.

Dessert: A quick tour through an open source parallel log processing system that demonstrates these techniques in a real-life production program.