Origin of "embarrassingly parallel" phrase

Question

For the purposes of history on wikipedia, is anyone familiar with the origin of the phrase "embarrassingly parallel". I've always thought that it may have been coined by a random Google employee who first worked on map-reduce. Does anyone have any concrete info on the origin?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

It's decades old, but I first heard it used in reference to graphics rendering. Imagine you're rendering an animated movie: each frame is 2000x1000 pixels, there are 24 frames per second, 60 seconds in a minute, and 100 minutes in the movie. That's almost 300 billion pixels that can all be computed in parallel. That's so parallel that it's embarassing to compute it serially.