by Dr. Casimer DeCusatis
One of the primary reasons for the phenomenal interest today in cloud computing is that it abstracts technological complexity away from the end user. Innovative high-bandwidth, low-latency services are accessed from the cloud, without much worry about the hardware or software resources deployed locally.
For the operators of networks that underlie cloud computing, [...]

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By Lucas Mearian
Engineers have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data — 50 times the capacity of today’s best silicon-based chip technologies.
The engineers, from North Carolina State University, said their nanostructured Ni-MgO system can store up to 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text, “far [...]

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It is most definitely not “business as usual”; it is “better than usual,” proclaims Ken Klein, president of Wind River.
Klein was talking to EE Times during a whirlwind tour of Wind River facilities globally following the closure of the deal that sees the operating system and tool developer company becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of [...]

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Among the most exciting features in Microsoft Corp.’s recently announced Windows 7 operating system is the ability it provides software developers to create powerful new digital media applications by harnessing the massive parallel processing power of NVIDIA® GeForce® graphics processing units (GPUs). Windows 7 gives developers this freedom through Microsoft’s new DirectCompute application programming interface [...]

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by Mic Wright
Speed
Grand Central Dispatch in OS X Snow Leopard means it’s able to take advantage of multicore systems. OS X Snow Leopard is also 64bit by default meaning it can address more memory which theoretically means it should run faster.
Windows 7 also contains support for both multicore systems, and for 64bit installations although it [...]

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By Mark Gray and Julien Carreno
In addition to having access to the right set of tools (covered in Part 1), in any performance analysis or profiling exercise, it’s been our experience that there are two critical pieces of information that need to be present from the start:
1. What is my expected system behaviour? In other [...]

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by Andrew Binstock
While much of the kernel that lies at the heart of Windows 7 is based on Vista code, several key advances have been made that get rid of Vista annoyances and greatly improve the user experience.
Inside the kernel, one important change centres on how multithreaded applications are run. The threading advances provide [...]

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by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor
At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, NVIDIA announced a GPU-powered 3D Web platform. Called the NVIDIA RealityServer, it consists of Tesla GPUs, rendering software and a Web service environment, all integrated into a platform designed to deliver photorealistic image streams via a cloud computing model. The new [...]

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by Dan Reed, Microsoft
Several bedrock assumptions in modern computing are crumbling. Individual processor cores no longer double in speed every two years. Netbook PCs are as inexpensive as smartphones. Scientists and gamers now use the same computing hardware and tools. A single, massive cloud data center or a petascale high-performance computing system contains more computers [...]

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ARM used its presence at TechCon3 today to unveil a new processor architecture built to speed up lower-cost handhelds. The Cortex-A5 is about twice as power-efficient as older budget designs but shares many of the same foundations as fast processors like the Cortex-A8 found in the iPhone 3GS, including the NEON vector instructions that boost [...]

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Cavium Networks, a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, storage, wireless and video applications, today announced that it will demonstrate the most advanced multicore processing solutions for next generation broadband access, services router, UTM, 3G, LTE and WiMAX applications at SUPERCOMM 2009. The event is taking place [...]

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by John Oram
Before the ARM Techcon3 Developers Conference, we spoke with Elan Lennard, Portal Program Manager at ARM’s Processing division. Lennard explained the background that went into the creation of their new Mali Developers Center. This will be a single location that will have all the necessary tools, sample code, documentation, developers’ platforms, along with [...]

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ARM today announced the launch of the ARM® Cortex™-A5 MPCore™ processor – the smallest, lowest power ARM multicore processor capable of delivering the Internet to the widest possible range of devices, from ultra low cost handsets, feature phones and smart mobile devices to pervasive embedded, consumer and industrial devices. Available as an extremely area- and [...]

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by Larry Dignan
Gartner unveiled its top 10 strategic technology list for 2010. Unified communications, servers and specialized systems are out. Client computing, data center do-overs, flash memory and mobile applications are in.
The list, presented Tuesday at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, by analysts David Cearley and Carl Claunch looks like this:

Cloud computing and analytics have [...]

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By Michael McCool (Intel, previously RapidMind)
One way of looking at parallel patterns (sometimes called algorithmic skeletons) is through an analogy with “structured programming“. The premise of structured programming is that a small number of control flow and data management patterns can be composed to implement the necessary control flow and data access logic in most [...]

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by Mark Gray and Julien Carreno
With the advent of the Intel Atom processor and multicore processors, Intel architecture processors are proliferating in a number of new market segments, most notably embedded systems where good performance is essential. In parallel with this trend, Linux is becoming an established operating system option for embedded designs. The two [...]

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Web 2.0 Summit, SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.- Oct. 20, 2009- NVIDIA, inventor of the graphics processing unit (GPU), and mental images, world leader in rendering technologies, introduced today the NVIDIA® RealityServer® platform for cloud computing, a powerful combination of GPUs and software that streams interactive, photorealistic 3D applications to any web connected PC, laptop, netbook and [...]

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by John Hebeler and Andrew Perez-Lopez
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the de-facto architectural standard for many small and large distributed solutions. Its growing relevance is reflected not only in the bevy of rich services the SOA stack offers, but also the variety of available implementations, many of which are open-source. Yet SOA remains challenged in several [...]

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By Maggie Shiels, BBC
Technology and movie-making have always gone hand in hand but the latest breakthroughs are changing the very nature of the process.
Those in the industry say that thanks to the role of graphics processing units (GPUs), the director’s vision can be more fully realized. It also means that special effects teams are [...]

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by Josh Simons
“In short talk about Fortress, a new parallel language, at the Sun HPC Workshop in Regensburg, Germany and thought I’d post the slides here with commentary. Since I’m certainly not a Fortress expert by any stretch of the imagination, my intent was to give the audience a feel for the language and its [...]

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