this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Random but why is "embarrassing" or similar adjectives so often used to describe a parallel program? What's embarrassing about it?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Embarrassingly parallelizable" is just the term for a process that can be perfectly paralleled.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

rather odd choice of adjective though

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

I think the usage implies it's so easy to parallelize that any competent programmer should be embarrassed if they weren't running it in parallel. Whereas many classes of problems can be extremely complex or impossible to parallelize, and running them sequentially would be perfectly acceptable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's commonly used in some corners of computer science

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's in the same spirit as the phrase "an embarrassment of riches". So a bit of an archaic usage.