by Alan Gatherer
This is the second of a multi-part 2020 Vision series outlining what the future may hold, as viewed by technologists within Texas Instruments. Click here for part 1.
Predicting the future is primarily an act of the imagination. However, digital signal processors are showing some strong trends and I think it is possible to [...]

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by Chris Foresman
Early attempts to benchmark OpenCL performance on Snow Leopard reveal some details about Apple’s first-out-of-the-gate implementation of the GPGPU language—as well as some hints at impressive processing speed.
Snow Leopard has been out just a few days and folks are already trying to benchmark its OpenCL capabilities. While the available tools are barely a [...]

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Sun Microsystems claimed a new watermark for server CPUs at the Hot Chips conference with its 16-core, 128-thread Rainbow Falls processor. Analysts, however, gave the IBM Power7 kudos as the more compelling achievement in the latest round of high-end server processors.
Power7 packs as many as 32 cores supporting 128 threads on a four-chip module with [...]

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French embedded networking software provider 6Wind and RMI Corporation have extended their partnership to port 6Wind’s embedded networking design to RMI’s multicore processors.
6Wind (Montigny-le-Bretonneux, France) said its 6WindGate solution will be optimized for use on RMIs XLR and XLS multicore, multithreaded processors.
Full Story

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Apple began shipping Snow Leopard on Friday, but the true importance of the Mac OS X update likely will emerge well afterward.
To use OpenCL, programmers write modules of code in a variation of the C programming language called OpenCL C. Snow Leopard translates that code on the fly into instructions the graphics chip can understand [...]

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Cell software development on the IBM Full-System Simulator described in Part 3 in this series generally takes six steps, some of which are optional:
1. Configure simulation parameters (PPU mode, SPU mode) and identify data collection procedures (triggers, emitters) using the command window.
2. Build a Cell executable on the host system using the SDK’s cross-development tools.
3. [...]

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The addition of multiple cores to microprocessors has created a significant opportunity for parallel programming, but a killer application is needed to push the concept into the mainstream, researchers said during a panel discussion at the Hot Chips conference.
The addition of multiple cores to microprocessors has created a significant opportunity for parallel programming, but a [...]

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by Michael Feldman, HPCwire
The latest and greatest chippery was on exhibit earlier this week at the Hot Chips conference, an IEEE-sponsored event that encourages microprocessor vendors to talk about their next generation silicon. The emphasis is on high performance chips, so a lot of the products and technology presented at the conference eventually end up [...]

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by Peter Glaskowsky, CNet
Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system, which hits the streets on Friday, has plenty of new technology–but one of its major new features will soon be available on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and other major platforms.
OpenCL, the Open Computing Language, was originally proposed by Apple to support parallel programming on GPUs. There are other [...]

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IBM Corp. is set tot take the lead in the race with Advanced Micro Devices and Intel Corp. for building the fastest multicore server processor as it unveils its Power7 at the Hot Chips conference. The eight-core, 45nm chip is expected to set new watermarks in parallelism and cache that could translate into leading-edge performance [...]

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By Matthew Scarpino
Part 1: Introducing the Cell Processor
Part 2: Building Applications for the Cell Processor
You’ve compiled and run your multicore Cell application, but the development process doesn’t end there. If runtime errors crop up, you need a way to step through the executable and determine which lines of code produced the errors.
The Cell SDK provides [...]

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NVIDIA Corporation today announced that it will be working with TopCoder, a competitive software development community, on the CUDA Superhero Challenge, a series of contests for computer programmers who will harness the parallel processing power of the NVIDIA® CUDA™ architecture to solve some of computing’s biggest challenges.
The first contest, which is open to all eligible [...]

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Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced it has acquired the PathScale Compiler Suite assets from SiCortex. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Cray plans to leverage some of the PathScale intellectual property to enhance Cray’s own compiler offerings over time. The company will contribute other parts of the PathScale intellectual property [...]

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By Aharon Etengoff, TG Daily
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has predicted that GPU computing will experience a rapid performance boost over the next six years. According to Huang, GPU compute is likely to increase its current capabilities by 570x, while ‘pure’ CPU performance will progress by a limited 3x.
Huang - who made his comments at the [...]

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by Douglas Eadline
The most popular interconnects for HPC are Ethernet (GigE and 10-GigE), InfiniBand, and Myrinet. (At this point, many people lump Myrinet into the 10 GigE category as it supports the standard protocol as well as the Myricom protocols.) Each of these interconnects are used in both mainstream and HPC applications, but one usage [...]

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Bjorn Andersson has an excellent blog post on the trends of tools to utilize multicore/manycore processors as well as accelerators such as GPUs.
“There are many similarities with that and where the HPC industry has been with the use of accelerators and many/multi-core in parallel systems. It’s been a journey from having only those low [...]

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by Cameron Hughes, Tracey Hughes
There are several concurrency schemes that describe how parallelism can be performed. Concurrency schemes such as peer-to-peer, boss-worker, workpile, and pipeline describes how tasks distribute work in parallel. SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) and MIMD (Multiple Instructions Multiple Data) are concurrency schemes that achieve data level parallelism. The PRAM (Parallel Random-Access [...]

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Freescale Semiconductor has recently announced that it has started sampling its QorIQ P4080 multicore processor, the flagship model of the QorIQ product family. The new chip has been designed using the efficient 45nm process technology, being the company’s fourth solution built on said manufacturing process, which is meant to deliver optimal performance and power efficiency. [...]

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Sun Microsystems claimed a new watermark for server CPUs, unveiling Rainbow Falls, a 16-core, 128-thread processor at the Hot Chips conference Tuesday (August 25). But analysts gave the IBM Power7 kudos as the more compelling achievement in the latest round of high-end server processors.
Power7 packs as many as 32 cores supporting 128 threads on a [...]

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This week saw the annual Hot Chips conference at Stanford. While I wasn’t there, what I’ve read indicates that the processor business is seeing some big changes. Let’s look at the announcements from IBM, Sun, AMD, and Intel.
The product that got the most attention was IBM’s Power 7 processor, which is designed for the [...]

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