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THE BIRTH OF PARALLEL COMPUTING EXCEPTIONALLY RARE INSCRIBED OFFPRINT. First edition, exceptionally rare separately-paginated offprint, inscribed by Gill, of ?the?first?paper?on?parallel?programming ? Subsequent papers on the subject did not appear for another seven years ? A decade later, interest in parallel programming had increased dramatically? (Dauben, p. 361). The origins of parallel programming can be traced to the early 19th century work of Charles Babbage, Luigi Menabrea, and Ada Lovelace, but it was Gill who first formalised the concept on 16 December 1957, in a lecture he delivered to the British Computer Society, published as the offered paper. He summarizes the aims of the paper as follows: ?By ?parallel programming? is meant the control of two or more operations which are executed virtually simultaneously, and each of which entails following a series of instructions. This can be brought about in a single computer either by equipping it with more than one control unit, or by allowing time-sharing of one control unit between several activities; the latter case seems of greater practical interest. Some of the advantages to be gained and some of the programming problems to be solved in putting these ideas into practice are discussed.? Gill goes on to discuss the meaning, problems, and potentialities of parallel programming, as well as time-sharing and automatic interruption. The paper concludes with comments and questions from the audience in Gill?s lecture, together with his responses. This prescient article correctly predicted the future importance of parallel computing: ?The use of multiple control units within a single machine will enable still higher overall computing speeds to be achieved when the ultimate speed of a single arithmetical unit has been reached? (p. 6). In the 1960s and 1970s parallel computing was heavily utilized in industries that relied on large investments for R&D such as aircraft design and defence, as well as modelling scientific problems such as meteorology. Parallelism became of central importance in high-performance computing, especially with the advent of supercomputers in the late 1960s that employed multiple physical CPUs on nodes with their respective memory, networked together in a hybrid-memory model. Today, ?parallel computing has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture, mainly in the form of multi-core processors? (Wikipedia). Multi-core processors are used not only in modern supercomputers but also in desktop PCs (for example, Intel?s Core Duo was the CPU for the first-generation Apple MacBook Pro). Stanley Gill was one of the most important early computer scientists. From 1946-48 he was employed at the National Physical Laboratory on punch card computing and the design of the Pilot ACE, a cut down version of Alan Turing?s full ACE design and one of the world?s first stored-program computers. From 1952 to 1955 he was a Research Fellow at St John?s College, Cambridge, working in a team led by Maurice Wilkes on the EDSAC, the first full-size stored-program computer. With Wilkes and David Wheeler, Gill co-authored The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer (1951), ?the first book on computer programming? (Tomash & Williams). We have been unable to locate any other copy of this offprint, either in institutional collections or in commerce. Provenance: Stanley Gill (1926-75), computer pioneer (inscribed on front wrapper ?With the author?s compliments S. G.?). ?Parallel processing is information processing that uses more than one computer processor simultaneously to perform work on a problem. This should not be confused with multitasking, in which many tasks are performed on a single processor by continuously switching between them, a common practice on serial machines. Computers that are designed for parallel processing are called parallel processors or parallel machines. Many parallel processors can also be described as supercomputers, a more genera.
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