The origin of the "embarrassing parallel" phrase

Question

For the purpose of history on Wikipedia, is anyone familiar with the origin of the phrase "embarrassing parallel." I always thought that this could be invented by a random Google employee who first worked on reducing the map. Does anyone have specific origin information?

Answer 1

The first use I could find in an advanced Google book search was from the IEEE Computer Society digest , published in 1978. The context and the fact that the author "embarrassed" in quotes indicates to me that this phrase was not invented here, but was used before.

Answer 2

This is a few decades ago, but I first heard that it is used in relation to rendering graphics. Imagine that you are creating an animated film: each frame is 2000x1000 pixels, 24 frames per second, 60 seconds per minute and 100 minutes in the film. These are almost 300 billion pixels that can all be computed in parallel. It is so parallel that it bothers to compute it in series.

Answer 3

Try searching: http://www.google.co.nz/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enNZ364NZ365&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=etymology+embarrassingly+parallel