Archive for July 2008
Free e-book on Multicore from Cilk-Arts
Posted on Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 4:28 PM by Malcolm
Cilk-Arts has published a free ebook "How to Survive the Multicore Revolution (or at Least Survive the Hype)" to provide some background and context around the emergence of mainstream multicore processors; identify the key challenges facing software developers; provide an introduction to multithreading; and review several programming tools and techniques available today.
Intel Boosts Open Source Thread Library
Posted on Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 1:13 PM by Malcolm
On Tuesday at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Intel announced that the latest version of its Threading Building Blocks (TBB) library, version 2.1, will be available for download this week. TBB is Intel's contribution to the growing collection of tools designed to help the millions of programmers worldwide exploit parallelism in their applications.Sun's Fortress Language: Parallelism by Default
Posted on Friday, July 18, 2008 at 1:47 PM by Malcolm
If anyone knows how to introduce a new programming language, it's Sun Microsystems. The company's highly successful Java language, which was introduced in 1991, has become ubiquitous in network-centric and embedded computing. Today, there's a whole research team at Sun Labs devoted to programming languages, and the big project there in recent years has been the development of the Fortress programming language. The end game is to "do for Fortran what Java did for C."Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Graphics chips help supercomputers become commonplace
Posted on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 at 1:36 PM by Malcolm
The sight of supercomputers in every home and office may soon become a reality thanks to video games such as Grand Theft Auto. High-end 3D games need the fastest graphics chips to run well. This has driven graphics cards makers to build ever-faster cards, and performance from the graphics processor on these cards is hundreds of times faster than the processor in a standard PC.Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
A massively parallel future
Posted on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 at 1:30 PM by Malcolm
AMD has fired the first shots around a massively parallel computing architecture in the form of the ATi Radeon HD 4800 series GPGPU featuring a mind-blowing 800 cores (or shader units). A GPGPU, or General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit, blurs the distinction between CPU and GPU and promises to usher in an entirely new paradigm for programmers to learn. The future has arrived in a chip that delivers more than one teraflop of computing power, and, best of all, it has arrived in the form of a $200 (6,700 baht) mid-range graphics card.Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Serial computing is dead; the future is parallelism
Posted on Tuesday, July 01, 2008 at 12:44 AM by Malcolm
Serial computing is dead, and the parallel computing revolution has begun: Are you part of the solution, or part of the problem? That was the question posed by Dave Patterson, head of the Parallel Computing Laboratory at UC Berkeley, during his keynote address at the Usenix conference in Boston on June 26.
