Archive for August 2008
Five Multicore Chip Startups to Watch
Posted on Sunday, August 31, 2008 at 6:23 PM by Malcolm
As semiconductor firms get around the limitations of making individual processors faster by putting more cores onto a single chip, the mindset of today's software developers and engineers mindset needs to adapt. For to really take advantage of multiple cores, a programmer needs to look at ways to make her code parallel, splitting jobs into different parts rather than the step-by step instructions delivered to single-core machines. There are also energy and communications issues that can constrain how far multicore can grow. This article give a list of startups that have the potential to stretch multicore processors to their very limit.
Edited on: Saturday, September 06, 2008 4:49 PMGPUs Help Spread Parallel Computing
Posted on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 1:09 PM by Malcolm
Graphics processing units (GPU) are evolving to provide a diverse range of image processing functions flexibly and at high speed; as a result they are morphing into architectures appropriate for general-purpose calculating engines. The term "GPU computing" has been applied to the idea of utilizing their capabilities for high-speed processing of applications such as medical imagery processing.
New educational section launches on CUDA Zone
Posted on Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 7:12 PM by Malcolm
NVIDIA Corp. has launched "CUDA U," a new section on CUDA Zone (www.nvidia.com/cuda) that provides students, instructors, and developers educational resources for its CUDA programming environment. Now there is one place to go for CUDA instructional material, syllabuses and curricula, and information on schools and programs that offer CUDA instruction. CUDA U can be found at www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_education.
Intel Lifts the Curtain on Larrabee
Posted on Thursday, August 07, 2008 at 5:00 PM by Malcolm
Intel representatives revealed some of the architectural details of the company's much talked-about Larrabee processor. The new design is the chipmaker's first manycore x86 platform and represents what could be described as a general-purpose, x86 vector processor, combining features from both GPUs and CPUs. The architecture is the culmination of more than three years of R&D accomplished under Intel's terascale research program.Edited on: Thursday, August 07, 2008 5:02 PM
Competition in the Cloud: Yahoo, HP and Intel Join the Search for the Future of Computing Services
Posted on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 at 10:29 AM by Malcolm
This week Yahoo, HP and Intel announced their contribution to what is becoming an active competition to develop the infrastructure for next generation computational services. The announcement of the Cloud Computing Test Bed is broader -- in scope and scale -- than the previous IBM-Google announcement establishing the Cluster Exploratory (CluE), and all this competition is definitely a good thing for the academics who will have several years of work on these resources.
