by Jared Bell, AnandTech
Investigating Sandy Bridge Memory ScalingFull Story

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ISC 2011 paper titled “Experiments with the Fresh Breeze Tree-Based Memory Model” authored by Jack Dennis (MIT), Guang R. Gao, and Xiaoxuan Meng (Univ. of Delaware), won the prestigious Gauss Award.
Here is the abstract:
The Fresh Breeze memory model and system architecture is proposed as an approach to achieving significant improvements by supporting fine-grain management [...]

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by Nandan Tripathi and Amrit Singh, Freescale Semiconductor
This Multicore Expo paper accompanies the class “ME865: Analyzing Multi-threaded Applications—Identifying Bottlenecks on Multicore Systems” to be held on May 3, 2011 in San Jose, CA.
Abstract
Various aspects preventing applications from achieving theoretical maximum utilization of multicore resources include: operating system (scheduling, synchronization, etc.), application code (parallelization factor, [...]

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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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It seemed that long forum debates about methods of measuring algorithms running time, functions to use and precision that should be expected were over. Unfortunately, we have to return to this question once again. Today we will discuss the question how we should measure speed of a parallel algorithm.
I want to say right away that [...]

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by Douglas Eadline Ph.D.
When multi-core processors first appeared, I wanted to know the answer to a simple question. If a program runs on a single core in X number of seconds, then Y copies should run in the same amount of time, provided Y is less than or equal to the number of cores and [...]

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by Shameem Akhter and Jason Roberts, Intel Corporation
Abstract
When programming for multiple thread or multiple core systems, it is important to realize the fundamental difference in memory allocation and access necessary from that of a single thread or core system. Contention and sharing with respect to memory locations can severely reduce the speedup gained from programming [...]

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by Michael Ewan
This paper discusses recent (Originally Published On January 23, 2009) research and testing of clustered, parallel file systems and object storage technology. Also included is an overview of product announcements from HP, IBM and Panasas in these areas.

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The complexity of computing systems has tremendously increased over the last decades. Hierarchical cache subsystems, non-uniform memory, simultaneous multithreading and out-of-order execution have a huge impact on the performance and compute capacity of modern processors.
Software that understands and dynamically adjusts to resource utilization of modern processors has performance and power advantages. The Intel® Performance [...]

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by Ganesh Balakrishnan et al.
In this paper, the authors examine the architecture and performance of the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 Series. Similar to the 5500 Series processors, the 5600 architecture will also present challenges to customers due to the flexibility and configuration choices offered by the new platform. The performance analysis will cover latency to [...]

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by Steve Conway [Published in Aug 2010]
Big challenges lie on the software side in efficiently corralling hardware’s runaway parallelism
At an IDC HPC User Forum meeting in 2005, Paul Muzio, director of the HPC Center at City University of New York, said that an application engineer’s ideal petascale supercomputer would have one powerful processor [...]

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Unleash your productivity with Parallel Nsight (aka “Nexus”), NVIDIA’s new development environment for GPU Computing and graphics applications that use CUDA C, OpenCL, DirectCompute, Direct3D, or OpenGL.
Parallel Nsight introduces native GPU debugging and platform-wide performance analysis tools for both computing and graphics developers, fully integrated into Visual Studio 2008.
Use the powerful Nsight Debugger set breakpoints [...]

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by Cary Millsap, Method R Corporation
What is Performance?
Googling the word performance results in more than a half-billion hits on concepts ranging from bicycle racing to the dreaded employee review process that many companies these days are learning to avoid. Most of the top hits relate to the subject of this article: the time it takes [...]

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Two Easy Steps to Better Performance
Step 1. Find the hotspot(s): Measure where the application is spending time
In order to tune effectively, you must optimize the parts of the applications that demand a lot of time. Tune something that is already fast, and you will see very little benefit. A “hotspot” is a place where
the app [...]

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by Agam Shah
Intel has demonstrated its first six-core processor for desktops, the Core i7-980X Extreme Edition, which will go into workstations and enthusiast PCs targeted at gamers.
The company said that the new chip will be faster and more power-efficient compared to its past gaming processors. Based on a new architecture, the processor includes more cores [...]

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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will offer a free webinar on Getting Started with Performance Tools from 1:30 to 3 p.m. CST on Thursday, Feb. 25.
This webinar, led by NCSA system engineer Galen Arnold, will provide an introduction to performance tools and techniques. A common application, High Performance Linpack (HPL), will be analyzed [...]

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By Max Domeika
As a follow-on to Part 1, which included, among other things, an overview of compiler optimization as it relates to parallelization of code for multicore applications, in this second part in this series, the discussion will detail a process for applying these optimizations to your application.
This process consists of four steps:
1. Characterize the [...]

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by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor
“I’m riding a train to San Francisco, and I’m reading a newspaper. The train’s vibrating and my arms are vibrating and the newspaper’s vibrating. I can still read the newspaper, but it takes more concentration, so I don’t read as fast as I normally do. It’s just more work to [...]

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Acceleware® Corp., a leading developer of high performance computing applications, today announced a partnership with Crosslight Software to deliver acceleration for thin-film solar cell and image pixel sensor simulations. APSYS™, Crosslight’s 2/3D electrical and electromagnetics simulation tool for semiconductor design, combined with Acceleware’s acceleration solution for the finite difference time domain (FDTD) algorithm now delivers [...]

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by Johan De Gelas
Performance per Watt rules the datacenter, right? Wrong. Yes, you would easily be lead astray after the endless “Green ICT” conferences, the many power limited datacenters, and the flood of new technologies that all have the “Performance/Watt” stamp. But if performance per Watt is all that counts, we would be all be [...]

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