NVIDIA announced that the third annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) will return to San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center from Oct. 11-14, 2011. In addition, Los Alamos National Laboratory will co-locate its Accelerated High Performance Computing (HPC) Symposium at the conference.
Last year’s GTC offered more than 280 hours of content intended primarily for computational scientists, engineers [...]

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by David Kleidermacher, Green Hills Software
Abstract
The motivations for system virtualization technology in the data center are well known, including resource optimization and improved service availability. But virtualization technology has broader applications throughout the enterprise and in the home, including security-enabled mobile devices, virtual appliances, secure servers, personal/corporate shared use laptops, trusted web-based transactions, and more. [...]

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by Aljosa Vrancic and Jeff Meisel
Abstract
Complex math is at the heart of many of the biggest technical challenges facing today’s engineers. With embedded multi-core processors, the type of calculations that would have traditionally required a supercomputer can now be performed at lower power in a real-time, embedded environment. This article presents findings that demonstrate how [...]

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By Ram Ramanujam
Imagine you are placed in an animated movie production environment where multiple applications run concurrently to solve a problem, and each application is using fork-join process parallelism during its run. You are asked why the overall run is not scaling well with the number of cores on the system!

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By Stefanus Du Toit
Just over a year ago short article was posted called A Data-Parallel Virtual Machine introducing the idea of a low-level layer to Intel® Array Building Blocks (formerly Ct Technology and RapidMind) that would allow people to very easily get access to the product from within languages other than C++, the language we [...]

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By Lamont Wood
Silicon photonics are being harnessed to prevent data traffic jams within chips
Moore’s Law could be rendered moot by the so-called interconnect bottleneck, strangling the possibility of performance improvements with data traffic jams. Silicon photonics, a way of moving data around via optical components, may help.

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By Timothy Prickett Morgan
The US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory announced on Tuesday that it has inked a deal with IBM to build a monster BlueGene supercomputer that will weigh in at 10 petaflops of peak theoretical performance when it is operational around the middle of next year.
Back at SC10, an IBM software engineer [...]

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By Victor J. Duvanenko
For the next several articles in this series, we’ll explore parallel and sequential merge algorithms. We’ll utilize Intel Threading Building Blocks as well as Microsoft Parallel Patterns Library (PPL), which is part of Visual Studio 2010. We’ll implement several different parallel and sequential merge algorithms, and investigate their performance on today’s multicore [...]

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By Colin Ho, ZDNet.com.au
IBM today announced that two of its supercomputers have been purchased by the Australian Synchrotron and Monash University, in collaboration with CSIRO and the Victorian Government to power an “almost” real-time, atomic-level imaging and visualisation facility set to launch in March.
The computers, linked to one another via fibre-optic cable, will enable scientists [...]

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AMD today announced that Adobe® Flash® Player 10.2, released today, is fully supported on PC platforms powered by low-power AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), enhancing video playback capabilities for users.
AMD and Adobe worked together to enable 1080p high-definition (HD) video playback performance via improved video hardware acceleration capabilities on all devices based on the [...]

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By Antone Gonsalves
Next year’s Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputer will list systems capable of performing calculations as much as eight times faster than the fastest computers available today.
IBM already has deals for a 10-petaflop system in the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago and another in the University of Illinois at [...]

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IBM announced that the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will use IBM’s next-generation Blue Gene supercomputer to enable significant advances in areas such as designing ultra-efficient electric car batteries, understanding global climate change and exploring the evolution of our universe.

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Synopsys Inc. has introduced the verification FastForward migration program that the company has been operating in pilot phase since 2009. The company has also invited Cadence Incisive and Mentor Questa users to join.
The verification FastForward migration program has seen many verification teams migrate to Synposys’ VCS multicore-enabled functional verification solution and improve their verification effectiveness, [...]

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By Patrick Thibodeau
China is building a city-sized cloud computing and office complex that will include a mega data center, one of the projects fueling that country’s double-digit growth in IT spending.
The entire complex will cover some 6.2 million square feet, with the initial data center space accounting for approximately 646,000 square feet, according to IBM, [...]

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by Chris Edwards
When, in the mid 1960s, founder Gordon Moore noticed how quickly transistors were shrinking on silicon wafers, he concentrated purely on how much space circuits would take up over time. A few corrections ensued as the frenetic pace of development of the early 1970s settled down to the long term trend: a doubling [...]

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by Chris Edwards
Chipmakers want you to buy multicore processors that, on paper at least, deliver much greater performance than their single core predecessors. The question is: can you make use of that performance? Parallelisation is not all that easy to say and it’s usually harder to do, but things are getting better.
A good number of [...]

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The II Open Source Software, Multicore and Parallel Computing Miniconference, part of LCA2011 was held in Brisbane, Australia on Tuesday 25 of January 2011. Here is a list of interesting presentations at the miniconference. Vint Cerf (VP of Google and “Father of the Internet”), Linus Torvalds (Linux kernel Project Coordinator), and Paul McKenney (IBM’s Linux [...]

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Nicolás Erdödy of OpenParallel pointed to their product’s presentation at Multicore LCA2011, a Miniconference on Open Source Software, Multicore and Parallel Computing.
Here are the video and the abstract of their white paper.

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by Prof. David Patterson
In my first blog, we examined gave the historical context of the instruction set battles of ARM and x86, covering the RISC-CISC Wars in the PrePC Era and the PC Era. This blog covers Round 3, the PostPC Era.
Round 3: RISC vs. CISC in the PostPC Era
The importance of maintaining the sequential [...]

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by Prof. David Patterson
This two-part blog gives a historical perspective on the ARM vs. 80×86 instruction set competition for three eras: PrePC (late 1970s/early 1980s), PC (mid 1980s to mid 2000s), and PostPC (late 2000s onward).
Round 1: The Beginning of Reduced vs. Complex Instruction Set Computers
The first round of the RISC-CISC Wars started 30 years [...]

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