On Parallelism

the word parallelism

recently, my sister was visiting me in waterloo, ontario, for about a week before my convocation. after about two days together, she banned me from using the word “parallelism” due to alleged overuse. Okay, I get it – I’m a computer scientist, and while I didn’t think we used the expression THAT often, I managed to avoid the word up until I found myself sitting in PAC (Physical Activities Complex @ UWaterloo, a.k.a where the exams are taken and the conferring of degrees happens on convocation day), waiting for the graduate students to finish walking across the stage so I could get my piece of paper // diploma. After a while they started conferring the degrees in batches of three. My friend Justin, also a soon-to-be waterloo computer science graduate, turned to me and let out a restless sigh – “finally, some parallelism”.

we know that Amdahl’s Law:

\[S(n) = \frac{1}{(1-p) + \frac{p}{n}}\]

tells us how much performance we get from parallelizing p % of n tasks. I’m still figuring out if that’s how this multi-tasking thing works in real life, though. One way that question haunted me is my attempts to get my site off the ground; I’ve been trying to get a post out for a while, but this is the first proper one, and that’s partially because I needed a bit more time to get used to the idea of doing certain things (work, research, writing) in parallel. i don’t really have a choice, otherwise, nothing will get done. I wrote this post in parallel while editing some other info; also, I remembered that I’m reading a couple of books in parallel, so let me list those, too. I can’t promise that my future posts won’t have the word parallel in them, but it definitely won’t be nearly as bad as this one.

the bell jar by sylvia plath ‘about love’ by anton chekhov

anyways, that’s just the start of this. for the uninitiated, here’s some links: https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/f/516/files/2016/11/Potter-2007-What-can-AI-get-from-Neuroscience.pdf?bid=516

https://direct.mit.edu/neco/article/35/3/343/113812/Neuromorphic-Engineering-In-Memory-of-Misha