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For the purposes of history on wikipedia, is anyone familiar with the origin of the phrase "embarrassingly parallel". I've always thought that it may have been coined by a random Google employee who first worked on map-reduce. Does anyone have any concrete info on the origin?
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This pattern is used to describe concurrent execution by a collection of independent tasks. Parallel Algorithms that use this pattern are called embarrassingly parallel because once the tasks have been defined the potential concurrency is obvious.
Some problems cannot be split up into parallel portions, as they require the results from a preceding step to effectively carry on with the next step – these are called inherently serial problems.
Parallelization is the act of designing a computer program or system to process data in parallel. Normally, computer programs compute data serially: they solve one problem, and then the next, then the next.
The first use I could find in an advanced Google book search was from an IEEE Computer Society digest published in 1978. The context and the fact that the author had "embarrassingly" in quotes indicates to me that the phrase was not coined here, but had been used before this.
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It's decades old, but I first heard it used in reference to graphics rendering. Imagine you're rendering an animated movie: each frame is 2000x1000 pixels, there are 24 frames per second, 60 seconds in a minute, and 100 minutes in the movie. That's almost 300 billion pixels that can all be computed in parallel. That's so parallel that it's embarassing to compute it serially.
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