By Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Hybrid Multicore Consortium is on a mission that perhaps all of computing - on the desktop and in the data center - will one day embark on: making hybrid computing architectures as easy to program and use as monolithic platforms have been.
There is a growing consensus - but by no means a complete one - that the future of energy-efficient and yet powerful systems will be based on the coupling of general purpose, multicore CPUs with various kinds of co-processors that also have hundreds of cores to do specific kinds of accelerations needed by particular applications. The trouble with these hybrid computing architectures, which can bring a lot of flops to bear, is that even the smartest people in the world complain about how hard it is to program them.
That is why the Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley, and Los Alamos national laboratories and the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have banded together to create the Hybrid Multicore Consortium, which is open to members of the HPC, server, accelerator, and software development communities.
