by Clay Breshears, Dr. Dobb’s Blogs

In his current editorial, our esteemed Dr. Dobb’s Editor-in-Chief Andrew Binstock discusses whether or not parallel programming will ever be taken up by the masses. He comes to the conclusion that (*spoiler alert*) the multiple cores in his devices will be more likely be used to run multiple and separate [...]

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By Andrew Binstock, Dr. Dobbs
The advent of the many-core era is not going to push developers to write more parallel code. That hasn’t happened as we’ve gone from 1- to 2- to 4- to 8-core processors, has it? Writing parallel code is not the problem. So, let’s stop trying to fix it.
Much of my programming [...]

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Virtualization is commonly used in embedded applications to consolidate workloads. Industrial systems may consolidate a general purpose operating system (GPOS) with a real-time operating system (RTOS) into the same physical hardware. Communications equipment manufacturers may consolidate many single threaded applications and operating systems onto a multi-core architecture, utilizing a virtual machine as a container for [...]

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by Timothy Prickett Morgan, The Register
The Computer Solutions group at AMD, which makes processors, chipsets, and now interconnects since the $334m acquisition of SeaMicro back in February, had $1.05bn, down 13.3 per cent from the year-ago period and also down 13 per cent sequentially.

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by Pat Brouillette and Jason Roberts, Intel Corporation
Debugging is the single most time-consuming task for embedded developers, more than double any other activity[1]. Improvements in debug capability are required to accelerate product releases for increasingly complex systems. When debugging software systems, developers quickly learn that simple printf() statements introduce degradations in system performance or introduce [...]

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by Abhishek Agrawal et al., Intel Corporation
In this article, we propose a range of power optimization techniques for media workloads. A number of low power optimization techniques along with architectural improvements have been discussed. Although the emphasis of this article is on media playback, the approaches discussed are applicable for a broader set of media [...]

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by Adrian Hoban, Intel Corporation
There is a huge variety of complex challenges that face product developers as they strive to create new systems that are faster, more power efficient and more innovative. Some embedded developers have the additional challenge of delivering a product that also complies with real-time, deterministic time constraints. For the embedded [...]

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By Yu-Tzu Chiu, IEEE Spectrum
Engineers in Taiwan say they’ve invented a tiny low-power circuit based on memristors that could improve the security of data transmission over the Internet and of using Near Field Communication (NFC) from smartphone wallets. The security of many digital transactions depends on generating truly random numbers, something that’s difficult to do [...]

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By Andrew Czyzewski, The Engineer
In a major step forward for nanoscale computing, German and Japanese researchers have created magnetic memory with one bit per molecule. That compares with current hard disks where one bit of digital information consists of around three million magnetic molecules.
The researchers’ device consists of a single magnetic iron atom — which [...]

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by Michael Feldman, HPCWire
The GPGPU faithful received another round of encouraging news this week. In a report published this week, researchers documented that GPU-equipped supercomputers enabled application speedups between 1.4x and 6.1x across a range of well-known science codes. While those results aren’t the order of magnitude performance increases that were being bandied about [...]

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Anil Patrick R, Chief Editor, SearchDataCenter.in
Hybrid high-performance computing (HPC) that relies on the graphics processing unit (GPU) is not exactly a new concept. While the general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU ) has been associated with HPC clusters for almost a decade now, the model began gaining momentum in organizations only over the last five years.
The [...]

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by Evgueni Brevnov, Max Domeika, et al., Intel Corporation
This article describes the evolution, implementation, usage, and performance evaluation of a bi-endian capable compiler. Software migration of legacy applications from one endian architecture to another is often hampered [...]

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Whamcloud, a venture-backed company formed from a worldwide network of high-performance computing (HPC) storage industry veterans, has been awarded the Storage and I/O Research & Development subcontract for the Department of Energy’s FastForward program. FastForward is a jointly funded collaboration between DOE Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to initiate partnerships with [...]

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By Don Clark, Wall Street Journal
Some researchers have a seemingly unquenchable thirst for computing speed. But a time-tested way of building faster systems is hitting fundamental barriers, prompting some new government grants aimed at tackling the problems.
The Department of Energy, under a program called FastForward, is disbursing cash awards to companies that include Intel, Advanced [...]

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by Dylan McGrath, EETimes
Thanks to parallelism and technology scaling, exascale computing will become a reality before the decade is out, but it won’t live up to its full potential unless fundamental power consumption barriers are overcome, according to Intel Fellow Shekhar Borkar.

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by Michael Feldman, HPCWire
Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and Whamcloud have been awarded tens of millions of dollars by the US Department of Energy (DOE) to kick-start research and development required to build exascale supercomputers. The work will be performed under the FastForward program, a joint effort run by the DOE Office of Science and the National [...]

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by Craig Pedersen and Jeff Acampora (Arium)
Software is increasingly complex. Time-to-market and product quality demands continue to create pressure on developers to perform at very high levels. Software engineers require improved tools to complete projects.
Code execution trace is one of the most powerful problem-solving tools available in the software development domain. Problems are often solved [...]

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By Milind Girkar, H. Peter Anvin, Hongjiu Lu, Dmitry Shkurko, and Vyacheslav Zakharin, Intel Corporation
Intel introduced the Intel® 64 architecture with the Pentium® 4F processor in 2004. Besides more virtual memory through 64-bit addresses, Intel64 programs had several other architectural advantages such as larger and more numerous general purpose registers, a register dedicated to the [...]

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