By Rajagopal Nagarajan
Multicore processors, which are basically processors with more than one core, are entering mainstream. Today, even desktops are having two or four cores and this trend is picking up and will only accelerate in coming years. This article looks at the drivers for the multicore, the challenges posed to the software community by [...]

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By Richard Gerber, Aart J.C. Bik, Kevin Smith and Xinmin Tian
To evaluate the techniques described in Part 1 of this series, performance measurements for the multithreaded encoder are the result of experiments conducted on the following systems:
* A Dell Precision 530 system, built with dual Intel Xeon processors (four logical processors) running at 2.0 GHz [...]

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by Christian Hergert
Traditional problems in Mutli-Processor programming
As we reached the speed-limit of serialized CPU instructions we started to add more cores. Obviously, adding more cores means we have to change how we process information. Instead of optimizing for the fastest serial processing of data, we look for ways to split the work into multiple tasks. [...]

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By Richard Gerber, Aart J.C. Bik, Kevin Smith and Xinmin Tian
Parallelization using threads on multiple logical processors is an attractive and effective way to optimize software. As technologies to simulate multiple processors (such as Hyper Threading) and processors containing multiple cores become the standard for even consumer level computing, the importance of parallelization becomes apparent.
To [...]

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Although we have a few years before the next-generation of gaming consoles make their way into the market, Sony is stepping up its research for PlayStation 4 to better entice developers. According to Kotaku, Sony is looking to leave the Cell architecture for a more open and workable architecture. Supposedly developers are having issues tapping [...]

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MulticoreInfo.com has published 1800 posts in 2009 linking to useful resources of multicore related information. Among those, we believe the following top 10 posts stood out in our view and were viewed by many readers. We observe a trend of software efforts to catch up with utilizing multicore processors.
Multicore Research Papers - 2009: Parallel [...]

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University of Illinois computer science professor Josep Torrellas demonstrates that easing a programmer’s burden in parallel computing does not compromise system performance or increase the complexity of hardware implementation in an article in the December 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM.
In the article, Torrellas details his Bulk Multicore Architecture and calls for a change [...]

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By Timothy Prickett Morgan
With Nvidia getting most of the attention when it comes to the use of graphics cards and GPU co-processors to boost the number-crunching capability of workstations and servers, it’s hard for Advanced Micro Devices to get a word in edgewise. Perhaps that’s why AMD waited until the holiday news dead zone to [...]

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by Peter Veentjer
If an application is using traditional locks, it it quite hard to use a different model then a thread per operation because once a thread enters a lock (a lock you don’t have any control over), the thread is ‘lost’. With IO there is a special extension (non blocking IO) that makes it [...]

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By David Mackay
“At times threaded software requires some critical sections, mutexes or locks. Do developers always know which of the objects in their code has the most impact? If I want to examine my software to minimize the impact or restructure data to eliminate some of these synchronization objects and [...]

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by Johan De Gelas
Cloud Computing was probably the most popular buzzword of 2009. There was a lot of hype, but basically, cloud computing is about using the large datacenters of the Internet to your advantage. Either by copying the methods they use to be very scalable and available and applying them in your own datacenter [...]

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by Michael Feldman, editor of HPCwire
It was a tough year for HPC vendors — well, any vendor actually. But in 2009, we also witnessed the acceleration of GPU computing, an increased acceptance of cloud computing for HPC, and the beginning of the post-quad-core era. There were also a number of other interesting developments in [...]

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By Tom McBeath and Ted Kenney
The devices underpinning today’s communications networks grow increasingly powerful, in their speed, throughput, features and supported services. That’s great for users - but it presents a significant challenge for manufacturers.
A router may be designed to interact comfortably with 10,000 other devices. Must its producer maintain a test network with all [...]

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By Asaf Yaffe
Intel® Parallel Amplifier is an excellent tool for identifying hotspots and measuring CPU utilization. Using Amplifier’s Concurrency analysis it’s very easy to find the places in an application that poorly utilize the CPU, but root-causing these issues is often more complex. To do this, you need to understand the runtime behavior of [...]

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Groovy Parallel Systems (GPars) offers developers new intuitive and safe ways to handle tasks concurrently, asynchronously, and distributed by utilizing the power of the Java platform and the flexibility of the Groovy language.
Main Features
* Concurrent collection processing
* Asynchronous operations
* Fork/Join abstraction
[...]

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by Mario Hewardt
The Windows operating system is a preemptive and multithreaded operating system. Multithreading refers to the capability to run any number of threads concurrently. If the system is a single processor machine, Windows creates the illusion of concurrent thread execution by allowing each thread to run for a short period of time (known as [...]

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Intel announced the Atom processor in 2008. That same year we were introduced to the first two members of the family: Diamondville and Silverthorne. The chips were both called Atom, but they differed in their application. Diamondville was used in desktops, nettops and netbooks, while Silverthorne was almost exclusively for MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices).
Atom continues [...]

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We’ve already seen the advent of storage virtualization that allows us to create pools of storage that can be accessed by multiple applications and servers. But as more virtual machines get piled on top of multiple sets of multi-core processors, I/O bandwidth is going to be a challenge.
There’s no doubt that storage companies across the [...]

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by Mary Jo Foley
“When Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 in October, company officials said it was looking likely that the product would ship on or around March 22, 2010. But due to some feedback from testers around virtual memory performance, Microsoft is delaying the launch by “a few weeks.”
Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s [...]

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The semiconductor market in the last decade has experienced two “once-in-a-lifetime” events: the dot-com bust and the global economic crisis. The coming year will bring a return to reality for the global semiconductor market, no longer driven by bubble economics that fostered the illusion of wealth.
The real driver of global economic growth will no [...]

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