by Satnam Singh, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
From the programmer’s perspective the distinction between hardware and software is being blurred. As programmers struggle to meet the performance requirements of today’s systems, they will face an ever increasing need to exploit alternative computing elements such as GPUs (graphics processing units), which are graphics cards subverted for data-parallel [...]

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by George Crump
Ask, “what’s the best way to connect to my storage”? and you’re sure to get a wide variety of answers. A few years ago, the answer you’d get would be largely dependent on the type of vendor that you were working with, since most only supported one method each. Now though most vendors [...]

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by Robert S. Grimes
Modern field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are great for a wide range of high-speed, complex signal processing but can be difficult to interface to external systems. Microprocessors are great for interfacing to other systems, especially when equipped with Ethernet for communications, but don’t offer the same levels of performance.
Until recently, [...]

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by Paul Stravers, Vector Fabrics
In this product how-to article, Vector Fabrics’ Paul Stavers describes a more efficient way to parallelize code for embedded multicore designs illustrating the process using the company’s online tool to parallelize Google’s VP8 video decoder.
Many silicon vendors rely on multicore architectures to improve performance. However, some engineers might say that [...]

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By Duncan Graham-Rowe, Technology Review @ MIT
Writing code for the latest multicore chips is notoriously tricky, but a new language could make it simpler, and make computers more efficient in the process.
A new programming language has been designed to get the most out of the latest multicore computer processors. If it finds favor among coders, [...]

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TidePowerd released Version 2 of our GPU computing solution for the .NET framework, GPU.NET. Our platform allows developers to quickly and easily write GPU-accelerated applications completely in .NET-based languages.
Some key benefits include:
· Stay in C# and treat kernel methods like any regular method
· [...]

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Lustre is a parallel distributed file system with many installed bases in the HPOC world. Lustre file systems are in many of the large HPC centers – for example Oak Ridge National Laboratory (more than 10 petabyte of data) and the Fujitsu K computer and many more from the Top500 supercomputers list.

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by Rick Merritt
The Multicore Association has launched a new working group to define a Multicore Task Management API to ease parallel programming for embedded systems developers working on heterogeneous processors. The group hopes to release MTAPI in November 2012.

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by Sebastian Zarnekow
Users of technical software often want to extend a package’s capabilities by writing scripts. To do this, developers need to provide DSL capabilities. This is the first installment in a four-part series showing how to put together an industrial-grade DSL without all the agony of writing a whole new language. This first article [...]

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By Michael Feathers, Dr. Dobb’s
It feels strange to write about software design today. The most important things that we know about design have been known for decades. In theory, every developer should be able to design an application from scratch using object-orientation or some other design approach. Oddly, though, many can’t. In a way, they [...]

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Andrey Karpov collected a lot of links on the topic of 64-bit C/C++ software development. These include his articles and articles by his colleagues in the sphere of developing safe and efficient 64-bit code; FAQ’s and a training course. There are also many reviews of third-party articles on 64-bit software development. Enjoy yourself studying the [...]

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by Rich Miller
Facebook has prototyped new hardware that can dramatically slash the power required to run web applications like Memcached that support some of the Internet’s largest sites, the company said today. The tests found that low-power processors from Tilera could get three times the performance-per-watt of x86 servers when running key-value store applications.

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by Paul Stravers, Vector Fabrics
In this product how-to article, Vector Fabrics’ Paul Stavers describes a more efficient way to parallelize code for embedded multicore designs illustrating the process using the company’s online tool to parallelize Google’s VP8 video decoder.

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Andrey Karpov collected many resources on static code analysis in one place. Surfing by the links you will learn what static code analysis is, what for it is used and what static analysis tools exist. You will read interesting articles and if you wish, you may join a group discussing the topic under consideration.
1. What [...]

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Paul Petersen, Architect for the Intel(R) Parallel Studio product suite, presented on July 21st on the following topic:
Modeling parallelism with Intel® Parallel Advisor
Here is a short abstract of the presentation:

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by Richard Gerber, Aart J.C. Bik, Kevin B. Smith, and Xinmin Tian
ABSTRACT: Automatic vectorization of code can fail for many reasons. Due to the fact that the compiler often assumes worst case scenarios, a simple fix is often all that is necessary to ensure that vectorization can be completed. By using diagnostics tools integrated into [...]

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by Richard Gerber, Aart J.C. Bik, Kevin Smith, and Xinmin Tian
ABSTRACT: Optimization of applications should not be a final step in project development, but rather an ongoing design philosophy that begins from the planning stages all the way through completion. By thinking about the optimal algorithms and data structure designs early on, greater performance benefits [...]

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by Douglas Eadline
Ever since multi-core processors hit the market I have always been interested in testing how well they actually work. Of course, there are application benchmarks, which are always a good measure, but I like to look at some basic properties of a new processor (I look at networking and storage in other [...]

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By Stefan Wörthmüller, Dr. Dobb’s
Today, all programs must parallelize tasks if they are to enjoy the power available through multicore processors. Until recently, though, parallel programming was the domain of server programmers and their scientific counterparts. Now, programmers from other domains are faced with the problem of migrating existing applications from serial to multithreaded architectures.

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by Joel Hruska, HotHardware
When AMD launched the Barts GPU that powers the Radeon 6850 and 6870 last year, it added support for what it described as a new type of antialiasing—Morphological AA (MLAA). Intel, who originally developed MLAA in 2009, has released a follow-up paper on the topic–including a discussion of how the technique could [...]

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