Stephen Wolfram Q&A

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Some collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram

Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.

June 1, 1996

From: Interview by Stephen Collart, Euromath Bulletin

Will parallelism—and systems which support it—be a decisive issue?

Not in the near future, I think. As you perhaps know, I was quite involved with massively parallel computing 10 or 15 years ago. As you also know, the marketplace for parallel computing never really happened. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The traditional general-purpose design of processors has too much market momentum behind it. Of course, small-scale parallelism based on networks of ordinary computers is happening. In fact, I myself use it often—running many copies of Mathematica on different machines in our company, and having the whole thing controlled by MathLink connections.

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