by David Pellerin and Brian Durwood, Impulse Accelerated Technologies
This article describes an iterative process for converting C code to run on FPGAs with or without processor cores, how to identify which code sections can best benefit from hardware acceleration, and coding styles to use to retain commonality.

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by John O (Intel)
DreamWorks Animation seeks to thread complex rendering applications that were written before threading was commonplace. This article shows a technique to find and fix thread safety issues by executing legacy code in a threaded test harness and monitoring execution with Intel developer tools.

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by Rick Merritt
IBM has become the first company to ship a commercial microprocessor using transactional memory, a new feature for multicore chips researchers have studied for years.
The BlueGene/Q processor used in the Sequoia supercomputer IBM is building for Lawrence Livermore National Labs will employ the new feature, IBM disclosed in a paper at the Hot [...]

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by James Reinders (Intel)
Proposal: rename for in C and C++ to serial_for
No more incumbent “for.” (it was voted off the island)
(let’s assume parallel_for == cilk_for in this discussion)
Consider:
serial_for (i=0; i < n; i++) { body }
vs.
parallel_for (int i=0; i < n; i++) { body }
* serial_for allows the values of n [...]

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by Ben Smith
As mentioned in one of my previous posts, IBM and NCSA announced the termination of the Blue Waters project due to higher cost that has been associated with this project. In simple words, the NSF grant was not enough to cover the expenses of a proprietary system that was suppose to reach a [...]

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Today, AMD updated its award-winning C- and E-Series Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) for ultrathin and value notebooks, netbooks, all-in-ones and desktop PCs with top of the line features. The updated APUs deliver:
* Enhanced HD graphics capabilities;
* Performance boosts with enhanced memory;
* DisplayPort ++ [...]

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A job scheduler is a policy engine which allows users to control over when and how resources (CPU time, memory etc.) are allocated to jobs. It also provides mechanisms to help optimize the use of these resources.

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By James Reinders (Intel)
It is time to make Parallelism a full First Class Citizen in C and C++. Hardware is once again ahead of software, and we need to close the gap so that application development is better able to utilize the hardware without low level programming.

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by Robert Violino
Private cloud computing is among the technologies that have moved into the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”, according to the 2011 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle by research firm Gartner. Other technologies the firm mentioned include wireless power, Internet TV and social media activity streams.

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by Bryon Moyer
Any processor with more than one core used to qualify as “multicore.” But, as embedded stood on the sidelines, multicore was largely taken up by the desktop world. And so it has tended to mean dual- or quad-core. Nothing overwhelming, just a nominal amount of extra coreage to keep from having to [...]

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AMD Fusion Developers Summit 11 (AFDS 11) was held in June. Satnam Singh, a Researcher from Microsoft Research, presented a talk on BarrelFish OS for multicore and manycore processors. The title of the talk: “Heterogeneous Computing with Multi-core Processors, GPUs and FPGAs”
Presentation Slides [pdf]

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AMD yesterday announced availability of the AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Software Development Kit (SDK) v2.5 (Formerly known as ATI Stream). Featuring advances in CPU to GPU data throughput, the latest version of the APP SDK provides developers a solid foundation to take full advantage of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), including the latest AMD A-Series [...]

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by David Kanter
Of the three leading GPU vendors for the PC, Intel’s story is perhaps the most peculiar. Intel’s presence in graphics starts with Lockheed Martin in the 1990’s. The military was always a leading customer for graphics technology – with applications ranging from flight simulators to visualization. In 1995, Lockheed Martin decided to try [...]

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Blue Waters is the name of a Petascale supercomputer that was supposed to be deployed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA). The project started with on August 8, 2007 with a lot of press publicity from both the university and IBM as the National Science Board [...]

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by Terry Wilmarth
This article presents a simple parallelization of the shortest path problem from graph theory. This problem finds a minimally weighted path between two points. For example, consider locations on a road map. These can be represented by vertices in a graph. Some of the locations are directly connected by roads. These roads can [...]

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By Matthew Scarpino
OpenCL provides many benefits in the field of high-performance computing, and one of the most important is portability. OpenCL-coded routines, called kernels, can execute on GPUs and CPUs from such popular manufacturers as Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and IBM. New OpenCL-capable devices appear regularly, and efforts are underway to port OpenCL to embedded devices, [...]

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