[rramadass]

>the recent work on task-based models, you'll see that you can have literally sequential programs that parallelize automatically

Can you provide some details please? I am not quite clear what you mean.

[eslaught]

If you really want to dig into it you can read up on the tutorials and/or papers from the Legion project: https://legion.stanford.edu/

But briefly, these task-based programs preserve sequential semantics. That means (whatever the system actually does when running your program), as long as you follow the rules, the parallelism should be invisible to the execution of the program.