My name is Darin Ohashi and I am a senior kernel developer at Maplesoft. For the last few years I have been focused on developing tools to enable parallel programming in Maple. My background is in Mathematics and Computer Science, with a focus on algorithm and data structure design and analysis. Much of my experience with parallel programming has been acquired while working at Maplesoft, and it has been a very interesting ride.

In Maple 13 we added the Task Programming Model, a high level parallel programming system. With the addition of this feature, and a few significant kernel optimizations, useful parallel programs can now be written in Maple. Although there are still limitations and lots more work to be done on our side, adventurous users may want to try writing parallel code for themselves.

To encourage those users, and to help make information about parallel programming more available, I have decided to write a series of blog posts here at Maple Primes. My hope is that I can help explain parallel programming in general terms, with a focus on the tools available in Maple 13. Along the way I may post links to sites, articles and blogs that discuss parallel programming issues, as well as related topics, such as GPU programming (CUDA, OpenCL, etc).

My next post, the first real one, I am going to explain why parallel programming has suddenly become such an important topic.