Archive for June 2008
Google urged to make a more loving cloud
Posted on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 7:12 PM by Malcolm
Yes, Google has opened its cloud to every developer down on earth. But for some, it's not quite as open as it should be.
Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Intel says 'no' to Windows Vista
Posted on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 7:01 PM by Malcolm
Windows Vista is not for Intel, it has been claimed. The chip giant will not be installing the new operating systems on its many thousands of desktop PCs. It has "no compelling case" to do so.
Posted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Supercomputing: Now Less Super, More Computing
Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 6:04 PM by Malcolm
The last time the world got so excited about supercomputers was in 1996 when a machine built by Intel and Sandia National Labs called ASCI Red breached the 1-teraflop level. But Teraflops are so 20th century, for now we're getting jazzed up about IBM's $100 million Roadrunner computer, which recently broke the petaflop barrier to become the fastest supercomputer ... ever.
Something about big, round numbers excites the computing world and a petaflop, which is a measure of how fast a computer can complete an operation, is pretty big and round. The technology industry's excitement around Roadrunner and ASCI Red is understandable -- they both signaled a big shift in supercomputing -- from its core technologies to the tasks was supposed to do.
Edited on: Friday, July 18, 2008 1:57 PMMulticore's Not-So-Secret Problem
Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 5:57 PM by Malcolm
Parallel processing isn't just for supercomputers or GPUs anymore. Computer makers are throwing multiple cores at everything from servers to your printer. But the focus on horsepower misses a crucial problem associated with adding more processors. To really take advantage of them, you have to rewrite your code.
Intel Develops Programming Language For Multi-Core Computers
Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 5:47 PM by Malcolm
As Intel and rival Advanced Micro Devices increase computer performance by adding cores to microprocessors, software makers are left with the daunting task of writing applications that take full advantage of the complex environment. Intel hopes to lend a hand through a new programming language -- called Ct -- the chipmaker has developed specifically for multi-core computing.
Donald Knuth - Open Source and Multicore
Posted on Sunday, June 15, 2008 at 11:51 AM by Malcolm
Donald Knuth: "... I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won't be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."Edited on: Friday, July 18, 2008 1:59 PM
Posted in General (RSS), HPC (RSS)
An Evolutionary Path for High Performance Heterogeneous Multicore Programming
Posted on Friday, June 13, 2008 at 6:01 PM by Malcolm
The multicore era has opened the Pandora box of parallel programming environments. Closing it won't be easy. To address both portability and performance on heterogeneous multicore platforms, a directives-based approach may be the way to go.Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Heterogeneous machines with x86 and GPU processors make more sense than many-cored chips
Posted on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 10:08 AM by Malcolm
Chuck Moore from AMD argued that these heterogeneous machines with x86 and GPU processors will make more sense moving forward than the so-called many-cored chips that the likes of Sun and Intel are pursuing where software is spread across tens or even hundreds of similar cores.Edited on: Friday, July 18, 2008 1:58 PM
Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Simulation Challenge: Mimicking Earth and the Brain
Posted on Sunday, June 01, 2008 at 3:04 PM by Malcolm
Simulating the human brain and the Earth's climate are two of the most important challenges in science, according to Robert Bishop, chairman of the advisory board to the Blue Brain Project. Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne in Switzerland and IBM Corp. are cooperating on simulating the brain, a project which started about two years ago. NEC's Earth Simulator is the key component of the latter project.
