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”.

there’s amdahl’s law, sure. 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.

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