By Alexander Wolfe
Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel, talks about the explosion of multicore processing, bringing security to cloud computing, and processor-based networking.
InformationWeek: Multicore processing is exploding, as evidenced in designs like Intel’s 80-core Tera-scale prototype processor. Ultimately, will we see entire data centers implemented in silicon?
Rattner: We just won the best-paper prize in the Symposium on Operating System Principles with our collaborators at Carnegie Mellon on something called FAWN, which stands for “fast arrays of wimpy nodes.” It’s the idea that, if we could build tomorrow’s processors out of arrays of relatively simple cores, we could deliver data-center-class solutions. It would be data centers on chips, and then arrays of those chips.
