Is parallel I/O suitable for mission-critical applications?

Signs that parallel techs are gaining interest

There are prospects that parallel technologies may find more widespread application in the business world, especially with the increased interest in big data analytics. For now, the use of parallel applications is just not that widespread.

There are prospects that parallel technologies may find more widespread application in the business world, especially with the increased interest in big data analytics.

Moreover, the holy grail of parallel computing -- a simple and automatic way to convert programs designed for sequential execution so they can use parallel computing architecture instead -- has yet to appear. Most applications, including the most demanding hypervisor-computing workloads, are simply sequentially architected wares that issue instructions as a series of requests on a shared resource, called a logical core, that at best simulate concurrent or parallel execution.

Those facts should not be viewed as limitations of parallel I/O to business computing. In fact, the application targeted by parallel I/O is not specifically the acceleration of business applications, operating systems or virtual machines. Rather, the application that is the focus of parallel I/O is the handling of I/O requests in a concurrent manner from multiple, hosted application software processes.

From multiprocessor to multicore

With the multiprocessor environments of the 1980s and 1990s, each processor handled an application. In some designs, a processor or group of processors was dedicated to doing nothing but processing, in parallel, all the I/O generated by the discrete application-processing CPUs. Lately, that design has been transferred to multicore processors.

In a multicore processor, there are two or more actual processing units called cores. Each core functions as a separate CPU to read and execute program instructions, usually with its own caches that can read instructions separately from the other physical cores on a chip. In addition to the physical multicore architecture, there is typically a set of processes -- software abstractions -- running in a contemporary chip, aka hyper-threading in Intel chips, that creates logical cores. Logical cores are also processing units that are capable of executing their own threads in parallel with other logical cores.