By Joe Pavlat
Jim St. Leger is the Platform Technology Marketing Manager in Intel’s Embedded and Communications Group (ECG). Here is an interview with Jim, where he spoke with Joe Pavlat, CompactPCI and AdvancedTCA Systems Editorial Director. Joe is also the president of PICMG.
Editor’s Note: Readers will also find it helpful to review a white paper [...]

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By Nick Farrell
MICRON HAS PRODUCED the industry’s first DDR3 load-reduced, dual-inline memory module (LRDIMM) and will begin sampling 16GB versions this autumn. The technology reduces load on the server memory bus and provides the option to support higher data frequencies and significantly increase memory capacity.
The new LRDIMMs will be manufactured using Micron’s 1.35V 2Gb 50nm [...]

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Mentor Graphics announced its acquisition of Embedded Alley Solutions as a key component of its Android and embedded Linux strategy Wednesday afternoon at the Design Automation Conference. Mentor also announced the integration of its Nucleus Graphical User Interface tool with the ARM Mali graphics processing unit; it announced the availability of a Linux and [...]

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by John E. West, for HPCwire
Earlier this month Intel announced it was helping lead a parallel programming experience for high school students. The three-day “Clubhouse Parallel Universe Boot-Camp” was held at Brooklyn Technical High School (BTHS). This idea is consistent with Intel’s overall drive to help develop the expertise that applications developers — and [...]

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by Douglas Eadline, Ph.D., Linux Magazine
Commodity hardware is the norm in HPC. What about commodity software?
“This week I want to add an excellent piece by Bill Gropp on Commodity Software. For those that don’t know, Bill and his crew at Argonne National Lab, have brought us the likes of MPICH, MPICH2, and PVFS2. In [...]

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This article was originally published in ClusterWorld Magazine, March 2004
HPC Masters: Bill Gropp on Commodity Software
Is cluster software any good? Just looking at the applications, from Google to fluid modeling, the answer is clearly yes. Clusters and the software that enables them have made vast amounts of computing power available to thousands of people. But [...]

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In this second part of a series of articles written by Tim Mattson about the jargon that has sprung up around parallel computing, SMP, SIMD, MPP, NUMA, and MIMD, are discussed.
* Single instruction stream operating on multiple streams of data or SIMD
* Multiple streams of instructions operating [...]

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by Andrew Binstock
Visualization software relies substantially on the ability to process large amounts of data in parallel. Complex parallel processing, however, can be difficult to do efficiently using native threads. So, what are the practical alternatives?
Visualization applications often need to represent figuratively or graphically features of large volumes of data. Whether visualization is used in [...]

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Aaron and Michael talking with Dr. Blelloch about his views that with the right level of abstraction, Parallel Programming is not and in fact can be as easy as sequential programming. He does note that, however, that “at the right level of abstraction” should be considered with care.

Full Story

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Nvidia Corp.’s chief scientist told the EDA community Wednesday (July 29) that chip designers need new tools to usher in a new era, moving to “throughput computing” from an era of “denial architecture” that has seen the semiconductor industry squeeze more performance out of single-thread processors thanks to software.
Delivering a keynote address here at the [...]

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Here is a post on a blogger’s views on Erlang/OTP after attending a talk by Kenneth Lundin in London.
“The main topic was SMP and it’s improvements it in the latest release(s). That’s exactly one of the main reasons for Erlang, parallelize computations on many cores, without worrying about locks in shared memory. Some of [...]

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by Robert Cravotta, EDN.com
“When I was putting together the multiprocessing taxonomy, I went back and forth between including or leaving out FBM (feedback-based multiprocessing). As Kent pointed out, public discussions in industry multicore conferences still lack an agreement of what exactly defines a multicore system. My concern with including FBM in the taxonomy is that [...]

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by Kent Fisher, Chief Scientist, Freescale
“Industry consensus on even the most basic definition of what constitutes a multicore processor remains elusive. Participants in the “Trends in Multicore Processor Design and Application Optimization Panel” at the recent Multicore Expo event were barely able to agree on the most basic definition of a multicore processor. After much [...]

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By Caroline D
If you have ever parallelized a serial program, you know how tricky it can be to answer these questions! With the move to multi-core processors, the need to parallelize software is becoming somewhat inevitable. Those who chose to continue to ship serial code are potentially exposing themselves to obsolescence. Parallelization is becoming essential [...]

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By Asaf Shelly
“One of the basic tools that a programmer has in multi-core programming and parallel computing is the state maintainability. A serial application has only one flow and therefore the Call-Stack (list of nested function calls) is in a way the application’s state. In a parallel environment this is clearly not the case because [...]

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Concurrent programming is one of the major challenges for the software industry. We are in a time of massive experimentation as language designers and programmers search for ways to make concurrent programming easier, less error prone, and more reliable.
Here are presentation slides from Ted Leung of Sun Microsystems that presents a survey of concurrent programming [...]

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Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have developed a microprocessor based on the ARC600 32-bit configurable architecture from ARC International plc. (St. Albans, England). A working prototype has been demonstrated in the laboratory.
The microprocessor has been named EnCore and it is touted as being capable of reducing power consumption of portable gadgets such as MP3 [...]

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by Alex Handy
Haskell is a purely functional language. Because it is based on Lambda calculus, Haskell programs can be provably reliable. But they must also be written in drastically different ways than traditional applications. Despite its distance from traditional programming, and its relative lack of common use, Haskell has become one of the most talked-about [...]

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As has been the case for the past several years, low-power design is expected to be one of the central themes of the 46th Design Automation Conference (DAC).
Power, arguably today’s No. 1 headache for designers, will be the theme of workshops, tutorials, meetings, presentations and technical tracks. An unknown number of products will be introduced [...]

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By Henk Muller
It is difficult to implement a combination of multiple real-time tasks on a traditional processor. For this reason an FPGA and hardware design techniques have typically been used instead. At the same time, multi core design methods have become familiar to many through the use of multiple microcontrollers and processors in order to [...]

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