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You are missing the "and repair" part.

Consider sorting data, because that's what computer scientists do…

If you can sort your data on a sea of 1000 processors in O(nlogn) with minimal errors (defined as out of order elements in the result set), then check the result in O(n) over 1000 processors and fix the handful of problems in a couple of O(n) moves then you will beat an error free sort that can only make use of 10 processors because of memory/lock contention.

For your bank (which should certainly start charging you a transaction fee on deposits), it might take the form of processing batches of transactions in a massively parallel way with a relatively fast audit step at the end to tell if something went poorly. In this case the repair strategy might be as simple as split and redo the halves.




Not to quote the watchmen, but who repairs the repair?

I am kind of Knuth with this who seems to day that this whole parallelization/multicore stuff may be a result of the failure of imagination on the part of the hardware designers.




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