BY David Patterson
Why is parallel processing so challenging? An analogy helps here. Programming is in many ways like writing a news story. Potentially, 10 reporters could complete a story 10 times as fast as a single reporter could ever manage it. But they’d need to divide a task into 10 equally sized pieces; otherwise they [...]

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by Rich Miller
What server technology is most interesting to cloud-builders? In conversations at last week’s Structure 2010 conference, two names kept coming up.”SeaMicro and Tilera are the two products that are interesting to me,” said Mark Williams, VP of Operations for the Zynga Gaming Network.
In a separate panel discussion, Facebook VP of Technical Operations [...]

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What began as an informal discussion two years between a physicist and a computer scientist has led to a new international collaboration aimed at creating computational tools to help scientists make more effective use of new computing technologies, including multicore processors. Among the scientific fields to be engaged are physics and astrophysics, climate modeling and [...]

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Whether modifying an existing application or writing entirely new code, parallel applications can be much more challenging to work with than their sequential counterparts.
Without a doubt, the high-level abstractions and APIs commonly used today greatly simplify the process, but most methods still require manual identification of parallel code sections, as well as consideration of such [...]

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AUTHOR: Hannes Hofmann
Three-dimensional (3-D) computed tomography (CT) imaging allows for more precise diagnosis of diseases, improved treatment planning and navigation, and insightful follow-up studies. C-arm CT systems, like the one shown in Figure 1(left), acquire many 2-D planar projections at different angles around the patient. Today, the algorithm for reconstruction of the 3-D data, which [...]

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By Timothy Prickett Morgan
The annual Hot Chips symposium on high-performance chips will be hosted by the IEEE at Stanford University this August 21-23, and heavyweights in the microprocessor and other chip rackets will be on hand to talk up their latest innovations. As usual.
To get everybody fired up about the event, Hot Chips has posted [...]

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As computer networks become more complex and pervasive, and their development is in a state of constant flux, leaving their design and management to human intervention is becoming increasingly unfeasible. An EU-funded project has come up with an innovative, self-adaptive architecture to enable future ubiquitous networks to deal automatically with changing circumstances.
Full Story

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Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has launched the FireStream 9350 and 9370 GPU compute accelerators targeted for the commercial, scientific and academic research markets.
With up to 2.64 TFLOPS of compute power, the new AMD FireStream accelerators are suitable for high-performance computing, cloud and enterprise-scale deployments that require advanced performance for handling highly parallel, compute-intensive workloads. Several [...]

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by Michael Feldman, Editor of HPCwire
Following my blog last week about the transition to GPU computing in HPC, I ran into a couple of items that cast the subject in a somewhat different light. One was a paper written by a team of computer science researchers at Georgia Tech titled “On the Limits of GPU [...]

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by Michael Feldman, Editor of HPCwire
If you’ve been following this publication even casually for the past four years or so, I’m sure you realize that a lot of digital ink has been spilled about the ascent of GPUs in high performance computing. This week was no exception. Part of this interest is due to the [...]

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by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor
AMD announced its next-generation FireStream GPU accelerator boards for HPC and other technical computing applications. The FireStream 9350 and 9370 represent the company’s attempt to match the pace NVIDIA has set with its “Fermi” Tesla-20 GPU offerings launched this spring. The new PCIe boards from AMD are based on the [...]

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Whether on a grid, cloud, or cluster, today’s science software runs in parallel, executing many calculations simultaneously. Programmers have found many ways to create parallel programs in traditional programming languages. Nevertheless, today there are a number of emerging languages that are designed specifically for programming in parallel. To learn more about these unusual programming languages, [...]

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In response to Intel’s ISCA 2010 paper titled “Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU myth: an evaluation of throughput computing on CPU and GPU“, Nvidia’s Andy Keane posts an interesting blog. The discussions at the end of the post are also interesting.
It’s a rare day in the world of technology when a company you [...]

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At the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) in Saint-Malo, France, Intel researchers presented a paper titled, “Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU myth: an evaluation of throughput computing on CPU and GPU”. The paper analyzes performance of 14 throughput computing kernels on CPU and GPU. The kernels include SGEMM, Monte Carlo, Convolution, SpMV, radix [...]

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Freescale Semiconductor is rolling out the QorIQ 64bit platform based on Power Architecture technology featuring the e5500 core, engineered for next-generation, high-end control and data plane applications in networking, enterprise storage, security appliance, data center and aerospace/defense markets. The initial products to incorporate e5500 technology are the single-core 64bit P5010 and dual-core 64bit P5020 processors.
Delivering [...]

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One of the exciting innovations presented at the ISC’10 conference in Hamburg was GPI, a new interface for application development for multicore architectures. GPI stands for Global Address Space Programming Interface, it implements the PGAS (Partitioned Global Address Space) programming model on the API level, so that standard programming languages can exploit the advantages of [...]

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Microsoft is progressing to the next phase of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) development today with the launch of Platform Preview 3 (PP3) of the next generation Web browser. Developers can download the latest preview to get a sneak peek at what’s in store with IE9 and what new functionality Microsoft is incorporating.
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IE9 combines the Chakra [...]

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by Neil McAllister (InfoWorld)
For all its promise of revolution, the computing industry often lags behind expectations. After all, your netbook is really just a laptop, only smaller and cheaper. The chip that powers your PC today has a direct lineage back to the Pentiums of yesterday. Your latest hard drive might hold 2TB, but it’s [...]

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by David Murphy
When you’re shopping for a new PC, don’t meekly settle for the default processor recommended by the configurator. Picking the right CPU is a personal decision that you shouldn’t enter into lightly. And with so many options to choose from, you need to know what you’re getting into when you settle on a [...]

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By Chris Kanaracus
SAS Institute is joining the newly hot area of in-memory processing, developing a series of high-performance analytics systems tuned for specialized tasks.
The first product will focus on risk management and become available late this year. Products for retailers and other verticals will follow.
SAS is working with Hewlett-Packard on the hardware end, which will [...]

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