by Aaron Spear, VMware
Modern multi-core designs often aggregate wildly different hardware and software technologies. Traditional debuggers, which show a snapshot of a portion of the system, do little to uncover issues that arise due to complex interaction of components.
Engineers routinely cobble together proprietary tracing facilities in order to have some chance of catching [...]

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On April 14 and 15, the Keeneland project and the Georgia Tech NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence will present a two day tutorial on GPU heterogeneous processing for computational science.
Tutorial topics will include
Architectural overview and motivation
Introduction to CUDA
Introduction to OpenCL
[...]

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By Jeffrey R. Young
The warehouse-sized supercomputer under construction here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign comes with a price tag of nearly half a billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive supercomputers ever devoted to academic research. And yet, when engineers turn on the machine this year, it very likely won’t be [...]

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This week Intel launched its new Westmere EX lineup, the latest Xeons aimed at large-memory, multi-socketed servers. The new chips come in 6-, 8- and 10-core flavors and will be sold under the name Xeon E7. According to Intel, these latest CPUs deliver 40 percent greater performance than the previous generation Nehalem EX (Xeon 7500 [...]

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Abstract
The AMD Fusion™ Family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) is coming. These processors’ compatibility with Microsoft® Windows® 7 and DirectX® 11 is designed to ensure that they will provide an outstanding out-of-the-box experience for those who use PCs built on them. Working in conjunction with the advanced x86 processor cores, an APU’s multiple vector cores [...]

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by Stewart Taylor, Intel Corporation
Abstract
This article provides an introduction to video compression and decompression algorithms, including two popular specifications for video compression, and the handling of video compression in the Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP).
Overview of Coding
Image and video encoders and decoders, in software called codecs, are intended to compress their media for storage [...]

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SANTA CLARA, Calif.—April 6, 2011— NVIDIA today announced that the latest version of the NVIDIA® CUDA® Toolkit is available for free to parallel programming developers.
Announced in February 2011, the NVIDIA CUDA 4.0 Toolkit features a number of capabilities designed to make parallel programming easier, and enable more developers to port their applications to GPUs, including: [...]

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by Vikas Varshney, Texas Instruments
Efficiently partitioned and bug-free software running on multiple cores is crucial for taking full advantage of multicore systems. Debugging of such complex software systems comes with an additional degree of intricacy due to the vanishing accessibility of the sub-system interfaces, buses and concurrent processing paradigm.
With this in mind, developers need to [...]

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by Rick Merritt
Intel Corp. announced the Xeon E7, a new family of dual-threaded server processors including the company’s first ten-core parts. The new chips will further eat into the RISC server business, form the next battle line with archrival AMD and bring the Xeon family on par with Intel’s Itanium server processors.
The 32nm Xeon [...]

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by Nicole Hemsoth
The IEEE, the world’s largest professional association devoted to technological advancement, rallied its troops with a new, broad cloud computing initiative that was released this morning. This effort has particular focus on lending some much-needed clarity to the complex topic as well as an extensive interoperability angle. The IEEE feels that [...]

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by Joachim
Functional Programming Languages like Scala, F# or Clojure have gained quite some momentum in the IT world over the last few years. The main reasons for this may be the fact that functional programming makes multithreading easier than classical programming models. Unfortunately, this leads some people to think that multithreading is much easier with [...]

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by Christine M. Lin, Intel
Most Intel Atom systems today offer hardware support for two or more threads of execution through multiple cores or Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology. It is worthwhile for developers to explore the advantages of multithreading in order to achieve better application performance or improve the user experience and responsiveness when running on Intel [...]

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by David Kalinsky
In a multicore environment, you can do resource sharing efficiently without locks, but there are some caveats.
Facilities for lock-free programming are indeed available in the hardware of many multicore system on chips (SoCs), as well as in the software of some multicore operating systems.
The caveat is that unfortunately the development of application software [...]

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By Andrey Marochko (Intel)
Having been first released almost five years ago and enjoying quite broad adoption in the software development industry since then, TBB still keeps growing new features at unabated pace. Sustaining this trend and advancing TBB’s quest for ever better composability, just published Update 6 to TBB 3.0 introduces a new version of [...]

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by John Gillooly
AMD’s new CPUs are still months away, but Gigabyte has revamped its current AMD lineup to add support for them anyway.
One of the most important things when building a PC with the aim on upgrading down the track is ensuring as little change as possible. One of the most dreaded hurdles on the [...]

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By John Morris
AMD is now shipping its Llano 32nm APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) to customers, suggesting desktops and laptops using the new chip will be available in mid-2011 as promised. The company’s interim CEO, Thomas Seifert, made the announcement during a conference call this morning to discuss a change in AMD’s supply agreement with its [...]

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by Ryan Smith @ AnandTech
While NVIDIA in particular likes to promote multi-GPU configurations as a price-practical upgrade path, such configurations are still almost always the domain of the high-end gamer. At $700 we have the recently launched GeForce GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990, dual-GPU cards whose existence is hedged on how well games will [...]

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Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins University gives keynote address at virtual school of computational science and engineering, summer 2010. Here is the video of the talk in 6 parts.
Part 1

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by Cameron Hughes
Determining when, where, and how to incorporate multiprocessing and multithreading into the software development effort is what is of the utmost importance in utilizing multiple cores. Which brings us to two of the primary questions:
1. How will I know when my software application needs multicore programming?
2. How [...]

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by Nicole Kobie
Software is becoming increasingly complicated, with non-core background features slowing operations down by as much as 1,000%, according to researchers.
However, a team from North Carolina State University has found a way to eradicate most of the inefficiencies, by taking advantage of multicore processing.

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