About the communications processor idea: I beg to differ… Programmers should not have to think about how data is actually transported, but rather deal with something a bit more abstract — message-passing is good in that respect, since it makes communication explicit but still abstract from the machine.

Shared-memory is the fundamental mistake in parallel programming, as that is what makes things hard.

I think it’s an education issue. We are simply not used to programming parallel programs, just as we weren’t used to programming at all when computers were new a couple of decades ago. Now that many computers are parallel and people start actually writing parallel software in practice, we will get the hang of it eventually.

One thing that should help is to create new abstractions that looks sequential while at a lower level actually does work in parallel, such as multiplying matrices or something like that. However, I think parallel programming-thinking will be a very useful skill no matter which abstraction level you work on.

Another thing that seems to be a hassle today is patterns for communication. Having a “communications processor” that can access the same memory as the “main processor” (essentially those two share memory) would help to make a fully distributed model (that only has message passing) look more like a shared memory model.

Obviously this is just reiterating stuff that people already know; I’m just saying that I think it’ll get there, through various technological improvements and more experience, just give it some time.