David Stuart, the CEO of Critical Blue, writes an article on EETimes Asia saying that his customers are deploying multi-threaded software onto multi-core platforms. They’re not using new languages or tools, just applying their brains to the problem, and launching products to market at an amazing rate.
Don’t get me wrong. Academic research is vital, and [...]

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Amid continued debate on whether semiconductor R&D is an endangered species or is successfully evolving to adapt to changing realities, Intermolecular Inc. and Semiconductor Research Corp. braved the debacle, with each announcing their own R&D initiatives. Intermolecular reported on a memory R&D pilot line, while SRC described emerging programs in analog, energy, medical and multicore.
The [...]

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Go Parallel published an excellent series of 6 parts on Managing Multi-core Projects. These were published between December 2006 and April 2007. I am listing them here if anyone never read those articles before or if anyone wants to revisit them again with a better understanding of multicore processors in the last year or [...]

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In response to Dave Patterson’s thoughts on multicore challenges and the rationale for increased government funding to solve them, Philip Machanick of the University of Queensland wrote a comment. He listed four lessons about parallel programming that were learned but forgotten. They are:

parallel programming is inherently hard, and tools and techniques claiming to avoid the [...]

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Here is a blog post by Jonathan Edwards, whose previous post (Too many cores, not enough brains) got some attention, now admits that parallelism matters.
latency can often be a more important issue than raw speed, and requires parallelism even on single-core processors. Performance tuning is often only needed in small regions of code, but latency [...]

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Solid-state drives (SSDs) are promising, but the technology may not be ready for prime time in higher-end enterprise or ‘’storage-class” applications, according to an analyst.
For these high-end, ‘’storage-class” applications, NAND-based SSDs could hit the wall. Instead of using NAND, phase-change and resistive memory technology looks more promising in storage devices, said Bob Merritt, an analyst [...]

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Scientists from Austria, China and Germany have implemented a stable quantum repeater. The device has the potential to obtain a central function in future quantum effect-based communication networks.
The quantum repeater could counteract the signal attenuation on long-distance data transfers, the researchers said. While in electronic networks, amplifiers and filters that regenerate the signal after certain [...]

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Michael Wrinn of Intel has a post about points of view that were brought up in a panel discussion (The Academic Community Multi-core Programming Roundable) at this year’s Intel Developers Forum. Here is an excerpt:
“The recurrent theme: performance. The audience, mainly from industry, certainly picked it up; several identified themselves as hiring managers, and lamented [...]

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IBM has claimed a major breakthrough in flash storage, with a research project that’s delivering data transfer speeds of more than 1 million input/output operations per second, two and a half times faster than the industry’s fastest disk storage.
IBM’s Project Quicksilver, announced Thursday, combines solid-state flash memory with IBM’s storage virtualization technology. “Quicksilver improved [...]

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HOT ON THE heels of its denials that anything is wrong with the G92 and G94s comes another PCN that shows the G92s and G92b are being changed for no reason. Yup, the problems that are plaguing G84 and G86 are the same that affect seemingly all 65nm and now 55nm Nvidia parts.
Full Story

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Two startups, Greenplum and Aster Data Systems, announced this week that they are implementing MapReduce, a cluster computing framework originally used by Google to analyze and rank Web pages, into their enterprise data warehouse products in an aim to make it easier for businesses to quickly analyze huge amounts of data.
MapReduce is a software framework [...]

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“The industry heated up this week as we in the United States prepared to say goodbye to summer and usher in the Labor Day holiday weekend. Hot Chips, Hot Interconnects, and hotheads at Nvision made this last week in August a memorable one.
Outsourcing was one of the topics that steamed attendees at Hot Chips this [...]

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HPCWire has an article that talks about current messy state of IT Ecosystem.
“The ascent of the x86 architecture took place at a time when the computing ecosystem was reasonably stable — the 1970s through 1990s. Applications written in serial programming languages like C, Fortran, and COBOL automatically got faster with each passing year as clock [...]

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As PCI Express continues to invade embedded systems, the history of legacy PCI is repeating itself. The twist is that FPGAs have taken on processing tasks within many embedded systems, augmenting or displacing dedicated processors and DSPs. Consequently, FPGA endpoint bridging solutions for PCIe must enable the FPGAs to truly fulfill their new role.
For common [...]

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While Intel picked up some market share in the PC world after AMD stumbled on product development over the past year, most of its growth prospects still revolve around computers. But compared with handsets, which continue to blanket the world in ever-increasing numbers, the market for computers is relatively flat. Most of it has become [...]

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There are a lot of online resources on optimizing C programs to utilize cache memory efficiently. In this article, Eran Balaish writes an article on how C optimizations can take advantage of zero overhead loop mechanisms, hardware saturation, modulo registers, and more.
Know your hardware! That’s what it’s all about. Using programming guidelines derived from [...]

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EDN Executive Editor Ron Wilson expresses his views on research papers presented at Hot Interconnects conference. Yesterday, he wrote about photonic alternatives to interconnect for many-core processors and SoCs. Today, he talks about a blend of conventional routing and fast global electrical lines to create an hybrid NoC (network on chip.)
“The paper, a joint product [...]

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Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s financial results have not reflected this but the microprocessor and graphics IC vendor has indeed changed in numerous and quite significant ways after several years of restructuring.
True. It can be difficult figuring out the extent of the changes that have occurred over the course of the last three years at the [...]

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Freescale has announced two new multicore DSPs for high performance, cost-sensitive audio applications. The multicore DSP56724 and DSP56725 processors are the latest additions to the Symphony DSP5672x product family. Both processors are code compatible with existing Symphony audio solutions.
Full Story

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Here is a blog post asking whether the parallel programming techniques take off their old academic clothes and dress in some new fashion that is friendlier to common developers? An excerpt from the post:
“That is actually a derived question brought up by some professors in their presentation about the evolvement of parallel programming and what [...]

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