By Michael Murray
“Solution to the Rrlang ring problem: Write a function which starts N processes in a ring, and sends a message M times around all the processes in the ring. After the messages have been sent the processes should terminate gracefully.
This solution is perhaps more complex than other solutions on the web, one of [...]

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by Lucas Jellema
Processors are not going to get much faster. No higher clockspeeds are foreseen. The speed of processing will be further increasing through parallellization, engaging multiple CPU cores for handling all tasks rather than a single faster core.
In this article Lucas discusses about his explorations of the world of Java Futures, ExecutorServices, CompletionService, Callback [...]

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by Johan De Gelas
“If Istanbul is introduced in the early part of H2 2009, AMD will have a small window of opportunity of competing with a hex-core versus a quad-core (Intel’s Nehalem EP). Time will tell of course how small, large or non-existing this window will be.
In well threaded applications, the best a “hex-core [...]

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AMD CEO Dirk Meyer has been reported to have forecast the death of the netbook, but looking back at the original story in which he’s quoted reveals he doesn’t have quite such a negative view.
The confusion centres on Meyer’s statement, made in a brief interview with Cnet, that: “I hate to say netbooks because a [...]

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by Yuxiong He
As an example of multicore-enabling a performance-sensitive application, we decided to convert the Discrete Hedging example to a parallel Cilk++ program (that is, to “Cilkify” the example) and increase performance on multicore systems from the popular computational finance library QuantLib. We chose DiscreteHedging.cpp, an example of using the QuantLib Monte Carlo framework.
As a [...]

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Magma(r) Design Automation Inc. (Nasdaq:LAVA), a provider of chip design software, today announced that ZiiLABS, pioneers of StemCell(tm) Computing, used Magma’s Quartz(tm) DRC and Quartz LVS Physical Verification system to tape out the recently announced ZMS-05 processor.
The ZMS-05 is a media-rich application processor that delivers high-performance application, graphics and multimedia capabilities within a low-power environment [...]

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by Ilya Mirman, Cilk Arts
Summary: Cilk++ vs. OpenMP
If your code looks like a sequence of parallelizable Fortran-style loops, OpenMP will likely give good speedups. If your control structures are more involved, in particular, involving nested parallelism, you may find that OpenMP isn’t quite up to the job:
* Cilk++ has nested parallelism that works and provides [...]

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The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded Louisiana State University professor Tevfik Kosar with the prestigious CAREER Award for the development of a new computing paradigm called “Data-aware Distributed Computing” over the next five years.
As applications and experiments in all areas of science are becoming increasingly complex and more demanding in terms of their [...]

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CPU core shipments reached 5.3 billion in 2008 and are set to double by 2012, according to market analysis firm The Linley Group (Mountain View, Calif.).
DSP and GPU IP ship in much smaller volumes, but shipments are growing quickly. DSP shipments will grow at a compound annual rate of 20 percent through 2013, and GPU [...]

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Because they’re fully and naturally parallelizable, hierarchical structures can be processed in parallel automatically, which in turn enables automatic, efficient, and optimized use of multicore processors at a level not achieved before. This article shows how to implement a complete and automatic parallel processing solution for hierarchical query processing. Making the process automatic is critical, [...]

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by Michael Voss and Wooyoung Kim
There are many ways to add parallelism to an application. For example, it’s very tempting to use the operating system’s native threading library directly on a multicore platform, such as WinThreads on Windows or Posix Threads on Linux. But this choice is a mistake. You’ll see why in the rest [...]

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IBM has launched the Gen-next technology challenge - IBM Blue Battle - in over 25 engineering colleges across India. This is an opportunity for students to get hands-on-experience on high-end technologies and use IT tools to develop solutions for difficult computing problems in real time.
IBM Blue Battle will enable participants to work on technologies such [...]

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Here is a video, which will begin with an overview of the Computer Systems group within the College of Engineering and IT at The Australian National University. These fall under the Themes of Bio-Engineering, Robotics, Advanced Runtime Systems, Performance Analysis, Parallel Processing, Operating Systems. Depending on audience interest, projects under the latter three themes will [...]

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by Ted Neward
If writing software is hard, then writing applications that will take full advantage of the ever-more-prevalent multicore/multi-CPU hardware—without introducing subtle race conditions and consistency errors—is even harder. Numerous solutions have been floated for Java as well as other environments, solutions such as software transactional memory API libraries, functional languages, and even entirely new [...]

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A hotfix has been issued for those of you trying to do sample profiling on Intel’s Nehalem-based processors, the most recently released being the Intel Core i7 family. Previously, trying to do so would result in a blue screen of death (i.e. Windows crash, machine lockup and reboot). Not very useful. With [...]

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The competitive edge of the European Union’s economy has risen over the past decade while that of the United States has eroded, according to a new study by a nonpartisan research group published Wednesday.
The report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that the United States ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions, based [...]

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Impulse Accelerated Technologies, a leading provider of high-level programming solutions for FPGAs, today announced the launch of a new Professional Services Team providing C-to-FPGA Services and custom IP for high-throughput processing. With this new Team, Impulse offers custom engineering, tools, training and platform integration services, helping application development groups reduce their project risk while increasing [...]

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National Instruments today introduced the NI PXI-8110 embedded controller, which is the industry’s first 3U quad-core embedded controller for PXI systems. Featuring a 2.26 GHz Intel® Core™2 Quad processor Q9100, up to 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM and a high-performance 7200 rpm drive, it is also the industry’s fastest embedded controller in the 3U [...]

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AMD provides images and video of their Istanbul multicore processor.
“Well Istanbul can fetch, sit up, shake your hand, and apparently, play the piano. Quite a feat. The new 6-core version of the AMD Opteron™ processor is scheduled to be available in the second half of this year, and it is everything we had hoped [...]

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by Alex Zatsman, Cilk Arts
One of the biggest challenges in building a parallel program is dealing with data races. Cilk++ offers several tools and techniques to find and eliminate races from your program. Reducers provide a a powerful mechanism for eliminating races, but as Spiderman said, “with great power comes great responsibility.”
“Mutex locks provided [...]

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