by Jonathan Erickson, Dr. Dobb’s
Parallelism and performance go hand-in-hand. But achieving maximum performance can be a balancing act, as Intel senior engineer James Reinders explains to Dr. Dobb’s editor in chief Jonathan Erickson.
Dr. Dobb’s: Sandia National Labs engineers say that adding cores to high-performance computers slows data-intensive apps. Your thoughts?
Reinders: It is an issue of [...]

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by Jonathan Erickson, Dr. Dobb’s
Niklas Gustafsson, a software architect and member of Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Platform team addresses some of the complexities of writing parallel applications and Maestro, a special purpose language for parallel computing.
To answer what is Maestro, he said, “First of all, Maestro is an incubation project within Microsoft’s Developer Division. That means [...]

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by Ed Burnette on ZDNet
“The second day of the PPoPP 2009 conference started with a controversial keynote by Yale Patt from the University of Texas at Austin. It was so controversial, for me at least, that I decided to wait a few days to calm down before writing about it. He had three main points: [...]

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With Intel’s Nehalem-based Xeons gathering like a storm on the horizon, AMD today gave the first working demonstration of its potential counterpunch: a six-core Opteron processor code-named “Istanbul.” Istanbul is a fairly straightforward upgrade over current ‘Shanghai’ Opterons: a 45nm processor with 6MB of L3 cache that fits into a Socket F-style motherboards, only with [...]

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By Brett Cline, Mike Meredith, Forte Design Systems
Hardware designers adopt high level synthesis (HLS) for productivity benefits, and need the quality of results (QoR) to match or exceed what they can achieve with hand-constructed register transfer level (RTL) code. Historically, the most interesting QoR metrics have been limited mostly to circuit performance and chip [...]

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Continuous Computing, a company deploying architected systems comprised of telecom platforms and Trillium software, announced its collaboration with Cavium Networks, a provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, wireless, and storage applications.
The combination of Continuous Computing’s Trillium LTE software and Cavium’s Octeon multi-core processor family, which boasts a 16-core MIPS64 architecture [...]

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by David Driggers
“As every soul on the planet knows by now, we’re in a global recession. That means that in 2009, IT managers will be looking for new ways to cut costs. Despite the gloomy backdrop, there is still a positive story to be told. Periods of economic uncertainty are the perfect time to challenge [...]

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Here is a paper that discusses about scheduling tasks on multicore CPUs based on thermal characteristics. Access to full paper needs login/subscription to ip.com. But you can go through abstract and overview on this page.
Abstract:
In multi-core or multi-threaded CPUs, it is advantageous from a thermal point of view to switch between running hot and cold [...]

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The National Science Foundation will get an estimated $3 billion to disperse as part of the recently passed economic stimulus package. While a small fraction of the funds have been earmarked for education programs, it’s not yet clear how much of the money will fund new or existing research projects as opposed to facilities upgrades.
The [...]

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EDA vendor Apache Design Solutions and chipmaker STMicroelectronics have expanded their existing business relationship and technical collaboration to address the upcoming power and noise challenges associated with 45- and 32-nm designs, the companies said Thursday (Feb. 19).
The deal expands ST’s use of Apache’s RedHawk and Sentinel platforms to address the upcoming design challenges such as [...]

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High-performance switches and unified fabric software from Voltaire will power high-performance computing solutions for Hewlett-Packard, Rackable Systems and IBM. The new architecture will enable solution providers to deliver computing systems with lower latency, increase availability and streamline management.
The Grid Director 4700 and UFM (Unified Fabric Manager) software optimizes throughput for multicore servers, improving the speed [...]

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The OM6120, a POWERful cost-optimized MicroTCA platform that supports up to 12 standard compliant AdvancedMC (AMC) modules, has been introduced by Kontron.
The compact Kontron OM6120 brings exceptional performance and versatility to a wide range of quad-play telecom applications and high bandwidth datacom applications with significant cost improvements compared to conventional MicroTCA platforms, says the company.
Full [...]

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The ability to run multiple operating systems on a single hardware platform is nothing new. In the IT sector, systems such as VMware have been on the market for some years and new virtualisation solutions are being introduced at a constant rate.
Real-time applications require specialised virtualisation systems, such as RTS Hypervisor by Real-Time Systems. This [...]

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Intel has sued Nvidia, arguing that a cross-licensing agreement between the companies doesn’t apply to CPUs with integrated memory controllers. Nvidia, which makes GPUs, disagrees. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said “the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU.” He described the CPU business as “decaying.” [...]

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Using the Parallel Computing Toolbox to develop parallel applications.
Parallel Computing Toolbox™ lets you solve computationally and data-intensive problems using MATLAB® and Simulink® on multicore and multiprocessor computers. Parallel processing constructs such as parallel for-loops and code blocks, distributed arrays, parallel numerical algorithms, and message-passing functions let you implement task- and data-parallel algorithms in MATLAB at [...]

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Connective Logic, a UK company, demonstrated their multicore software development platform named Blueprint at TechCrunch50 conference last year.
John Gross and Jeremy Orme of Connective Logic started writing a six-part article introducing Blueprint, that provides an alternative approach to multi-core development. While Blueprint is interoperable with technologies such as Microsoft’s Task Parallel Library (TPL) and [...]

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The high performance computing (HPC) market will decline 5.4 percent in 2009, but remain one of the most resilient sectors in information technology through the recession, according to the latest forecast released Wednesday (Feb 18) from International Data Corp. (Framingham, Mass.).
“HPC will come out of the recession as it came into it as one of [...]

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By Jack Fegreus
The conundrum for IT is that the same forces that drive the solution also drive the problems. Multi-core, multi-processor servers often have 16 CPUs. Servers with that magnitude of processing power, however, are a two-edged sword. Well-conceived IT plans for resource consolidation will dramatically cut runaway power and cooling costs. On the other [...]

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Channel9’s Expert-to-Expert program has a video where Joe Duffy (creator of PLINQ) discusses concurrent programming and parallelism.
“Joe Duffy spends a lot of time thinking about the future of concurrent programming and parallelism. In his role as Lead Developer in the Parallel Computing Platform team, Joe is the creator of PLINQ and a key contributor to [...]

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By Hichem Belhadj, Vishal Aggrawal, Ajay Pradhan, and Amal Zerrouki, Actel
In Part 1 of this series, the authors introduced power-aware FPGA design. In Part 2, they discussed fighting dynamic power. In this last installment of this series, they continue discussion of fighting dynamic power and propose power reduction methodology. Here are some excerpts from their [...]

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