by Sandeep Koul
Multicore processorsadvanced a lot and are being used in mobile phones and PDAs today. To harness these multi-core capabilities, developers need to parallelize their code. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 are filled with features to help developers write efficient code for multi-core machines and that too without drilling [...]

[Read more →]

by Phil Wainewright
Speaking in the opening keynote of SIIA OnDemand in San Jose this morning, SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard let slip a statistic that set several attendees a-twittering. He revealed that the SaaS provider’s multi-tenant application infrastructure supports its 2,850+ customers and 5.4+ million users on just 150 servers.
The ability to achieve such enormous [...]

[Read more →]

In September, Intel introduced its back-to-the-future idea of tiny “microservers.” Now the company wants to make the design into a standard others can use, too.
The chipmaker will offer its design specification to the Server System Infrastructure Forum by the end of the year, said Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel’s high-density computing group. If the [...]

[Read more →]

By Aharon Etengoff
Nvidia has claimed that its nForce chipsets are “better” than Intel’s. A company spokesperson also criticized the chip manufacturer for allegedly postponing USB 3 introduction until 2011.
“Nvidia nForce chipsets have traditionally been full of innovative features, even better than Intel’s own chipsets. [For example], Nvidia Ion has redefined the netbook category,” Nvidia spokesperson [...]

[Read more →]

By Todd Hixon
In Part 1 in this series, I dealt with the myriad of details relating to exception vector table formating, startup code/stack configuration, remapping RAM functions, and hardware interrupt configuration that a programmer must be concerned with porting code from an existing ARM7 to the Cortex-M3 core. Now in this second part, the tutorial [...]

[Read more →]

By Todd Hixon
The ARM Cortex-M3 core has enhancements to its architecture that result in increased code execution speed, lower power consumption, and easier software development (Table 1). The result is a true real-time core that overcomes real-time processing limitations of the ARM7TMI core. Over time, most ARM7-based designs will be migrated to the Cortex-M3.

Although ARM [...]

[Read more →]

Chip manufacturer STMicroelectronics has approved the use of the ARM’s Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor in its next generation digital television system-on-chip (SOC) integrated circuits as well as set top boxes.
However, ARM already offers its processor technology for a wide range of equipments manufactured by the STMicroelectronics, but the new agreement entails that the company’s next-generation [...]

[Read more →]

by Michael Wolfe, Compiler Engineer, The Portland Group, Inc.
The buzz and excitement around Intel’s Larrabee processor continues to build. Intel has been careful to present Larrabee as a graphics processor that can also be used for highly parallel tasks such as game physics, avoiding the claim that it will be appropriate for HPC. The [...]

[Read more →]

By Jackson M
“One of the most useful aspects of Intel® Parallel Advisor Lite is its ability to model parallelism in my application without actually running the code in parallel. Simply by doing this modeling it can tell me potential race conditions and correctness issues while still running everything serially. At first glance I ask myself [...]

[Read more →]

By Richard Adhikari
Intel and Numonyx, a company created by Intel and STMicro, say they’ve recently made significant headway in the development of phase change memory. PCM is a type of non-volatile computer memory, which means it does not require a constant power supply to retain information. Though the new developments aren’t ready for products yet, [...]

[Read more →]

By Jean J Labrosse, Lotta Frimanson and Anders Lundgren
The ARM Cortex-M3 architecture provides many improvements compared with its predecessor, the popular ARM7/9, and is designed to be particularly suitable for cost-sensitive embedded applications that require deterministic system behavior.
It’s a member of the Cortex-M family, one of the three ARM Cortex architectures that were introduced to [...]

[Read more →]

by Charlie Demerjian, SemiAccurate News
TILERA IS CLAIMING to have the first commercial CPU to reach 100 cores, and while this is true, the real interesting technology is in the interconnects. The overall chip is quite a marvel, and it is unlike any mainstream CPU you have ever heard of.
Large caches, wide memory busses, ring busses [...]

[Read more →]

In a splashy New York City event, Juniper Networks announced its next generation of silicon, systems, software and partnerships around a family of networking products geared to serve businesses and service providers. Details are still scarce on the products that the company will use to attack archrival Cisco Systems.
The products are based on Junos Trio, [...]

[Read more →]

Larry O’Brien talks to Grady Booch about the 15th anniversary of Design Patterns, the wicked problems of developing in the multicore era, what programming languages he’s using now, and the best coffee.
In an answer to Larry’s question “How big a deal for software development is the manycore era?”, Booch says, “the average developer is not [...]

[Read more →]

The inaugural GPU Technology Conference was held between Sept 29 and Oct 02. The recorded keynotes and general sessions are now available online and you can read up on the coverage from the GTC blogs below.
Screencast plus audio recordings of most sessions are now getting posted as they become available, and can be found in [...]

[Read more →]

British chip designer ARM says smartphones will be running on multicore processors by this time next year.
Speaking at a showcase of ARM-powered devices in central London - encompassing everything from the new Nokia N900 Linux smartphone to a remarkably thin prototype netbook - the company’s mobile segment manager, Laurence Bryant, told PC Pro that smartphone [...]

[Read more →]

NVIDIA today announced that the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Tsinghua University have been recognized as CUDA Centers of Excellence for their commitment to furthering GPU Computing research and their teaching of parallel programming courses based on the CUDA(TM) architecture.
They join an elite list of five other [...]

[Read more →]

Pervasive Software® Inc. announced the release of Pervasive DataCloud® 2. Already in production delivering prepackaged integrations, enhanced analytics and SaaS data profiling, Pervasive DataCloud now offers an API to allow any cloud developer, including Amazon Web Services, force.com and Azure developers, to seamlessly deliver and/or consume robust data services.
More than 150 Pervasive DataSolutions™ customers are [...]

[Read more →]

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor
With all the recent hoopla about GPGPU acceleration in high performance computing, it’s easy to forget that Roadrunner, the most powerful supercomputer in the world, is based on a different brand of accelerator. The machine at Los Alamos National Laboratory uses 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs hooked up to 6,480 AMD [...]

[Read more →]

Dave Stewart and Skip Hovsmith of CriticalBlue originally developed technology to take software and pull it out of the code and implement it in gates. They had some limited success with this. But now they have refocused their technology on the problem of taking legacy code and helping make it multicore ready with their Prism [...]

[Read more →]