NVIDIA astonished us with GT200 tipping the scales at 1.4 billion transistors. Fermi is more than twice that at 3 billion. And literally, that’s what Fermi is - more than twice a GT200.
At the high level the specs are simple. Fermi has a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface and 512 cores. That’s more than twice the [...]

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NVIDIA Corp. today introduced NVIDIA® Nexus, the industry’s first development environment for massively parallel computing that is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio, the world’s most popular development environment for Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services.
“NVIDIA Nexus is going to improve programmer productivity immediately,” said Tarek El Dokor at Edge 3 Technologies. “An integrated GPU [...]

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) announced plans today for a new supercomputer that will use NVIDIA®’s next generation CUDA™ GPU architecture, codenamed “Fermi”. Used to pursue research in areas such as energy and climate change, ORNL’s supercomputer is expected to be 10-times more powerful than today’s fastest supercomputer.
Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate lab director for Computing [...]

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Today at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, Jen-Hsun Huang has announced Fermi, the company’s next generation GPU architecture.
Nvidia has long intended that their GPUs will evolve to look more akin to a CPU, a step at a time. Fermi certainly goes in this direction, leaving behind many of the more charming, but baroque, elements [...]

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NVIDIA Corp. today introduced its next generation CUDA™ GPU architecture, codenamed “Fermi”. An entirely new ground-up design, the “Fermi”™ architecture is the foundation for the world’s first computational graphics processing units (GPUs), delivering breakthroughs in both graphics and GPU computing.
“NVIDIA and the Fermi team have taken a giant step towards making GPUs attractive for a [...]

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A group of Japanese researchers are collaborating on a software standard for multicore processors to be used in a range of technology products, including mobile phones and in-vehicle navigation systems. The effort could lead to the development of a super CPU, according to the researchers.
First reported in Japanese publication Nikkei Business News early this month, [...]

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by Jack Woehr
Some threading semantics are desirably non-rigorous. What happens when we have to define every aspect of the parallel execution of our program?
This article is being composed in a browser based on the Mozilla codebase. It is inherently threaded as it is running under the X windowing system, and the hardware is multicore.
Full Story

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by Thom Holwerda
“It seems like Microsoft Research is really busy these days with research operating systems. We had Singularity, a microkernel operating system written in managed code, and late last week we were acquainted with Barrelfish, a “multikernel” system which treats a multicore system as a network of independent cores, using ideas from distributed systems. [...]

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With an eye on next generation mobile, wireless and consumer applications, Broadcom has signed a licensing agreement for the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor. The agreement includes ARM Neon Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) technology for the ARM Cortex-A series processors, to provide acceleration for advanced multimedia, gaming and compute intensive applications.
Nambi Seshadri, VP and [...]

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NVIDIA today released the first public OpenCL conformant GPU drivers for Windows and Linux. In addition to the drivers themselves, NVIDIA has released a powerful performance profiling tool and an OpenCL Best Practices Guide.
NVIDIA was the first to release beta OpenCL GPU drivers to developers in April 2009.This public release is fully conformant with the [...]

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NVIDIA today announced work with Microsoft to promote NVIDIA® Tesla™ graphics processing units (GPUs) for high performance parallel computing using the Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system.
“The coupling of GPUs and CPUs illustrates the enormous power and opportunity of multicore co-processing,” said Dan Reed, corporate vice president of Extreme Computing at Microsoft. “NVIDIA’s work with [...]

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By Tom Spyrou
Typically with multi-core processors, the first thought is to use multiple threads in a shared memory programming paradigm to parallelize a software algorithm. This approach can work very well, especially for software designed from the ground up to be thread safe and thread efficient. Thread safety means that the threads and data structures [...]

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By Eric Carmes
The drive to all IP-based services is placing stringent performance demands on IP-based equipment and devices, which in turn is growing demand for multicore technology. There is strong growing demand for advanced telecommunications services on wired and wireless Next Generation Network (NGN) infrastructures, and fast growing demand for the same in the enterprise [...]

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by Jonathan Erickson
Multitasking is good when it comes to computer programs, letting them do more with less. But when computer programmers start multitasking, productivity flies out the door.
For one thing, when programmers have to shift tasks, it takes “a really, really, really long time,” says Joel Spolsky, host of the Joel On Software Web site [...]

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Prof. David A. Wood compiled a reading list for his Fall 2009, “Programming Current and Future Multicore Processors” course at University of Wisconsin, Madison. It has many papers and articles related to multicore programming. Here is the list of topics.
Introduction
Multicore processors
Pthreads
Locking and Threads
OpenMP
Cilk/TBB
Serialization Sets
MapReduce
Transactional Memory
Reading List
Thanks to Prof. Wood, the course website also has the [...]

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by Thom Holwerda
Most of us are probably aware of Singularity, a research operating system out of Microsoft Research which explored a number of new ideas, which is available as open source software. Singularity isn’t the only research OS out of Microsoft; they recently released the first snapshot of a new operating system, called Barrelfish. It [...]

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By Stacey Higginbotham
Microsoft and Intel this summer both snapped up companies with technology that helps software developers build programs that take advantage of multicore chips. Last July I pulled together a list of five startups to watch in the multicore programming space, and prompted by Microsoft announcing on Monday (technically the first day of autumn) [...]

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by Larry Dignan
The Intel Developer Forum wrapped up and there are a few weeks worth of presentations, keynotes and technical sessions to mull over. In the meantime, here are top nine takeaways from IDF.
1. Intel is increasingly about software.
2. Intel is serious about solid-state drives in the data center.
3. Intel thinks speed will matter for [...]

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By Penny Crosman
Each night, Bloomberg calculates pricing for 1.3 million hard-to-price asset-backed securities such as collateralized mortgage obligations (including cash flows, key rate duration and such). Since 1996, the market news giant has performed these calculations — single-factor stochastic models based on Monte Carlo simulations — on a farm of Linux servers in its data [...]

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By Rik Myslewski
Intel is introducing a reference design for what it calls “a new category” of microservers, along with low-wattage Xeon processors to power them.
The term “microserver” has been bandied about for some time now, with various and sundry vendors dipping their toes into the market for small, low-power, densely packed systems. Now Intel is [...]

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