In a move that cements its leadership position in development tools for GPU Computing, NVIDIA today announced the release of NVIDIA® Parallel Nsight™ software, the industry’s first development environment for GPU-accelerated applications that work with Microsoft Visual Studio.
NVIDIA has also released CUDA™ Toolkit 3.1, an update to its CUDA software development kit (SDK), available here.
“With [...]

[Read more →]

by Eugene Loh
The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program sought a tenfold productivity improvement in trans-petaflop systems for high-performance computing (HPC). This article describes programmability studies undertaken by Sun Microsystems in its HPCS participation. These studies were distinct from Sun’s ongoing development of a new HPC programming language (Fortress) and the company’s broader HPCS [...]

[Read more →]

An Interview with Joseph Hellerstein
by Nicole Hemsoth
MIT’s Technology Review provided some in-depth coverage on the top ten emerging technologies for the coming year. On a list that includes solar fuel, green concrete, and light-trapping photovoltaics the publication tacked on the concept of “cloud programming” — a revolutionary movement that is a attributed in large part [...]

[Read more →]

Release Highlights
* Support for the new Fermi architecture, with:
o Native 64-bit GPU support
o Multiple Copy Engine support
o ECC reporting
[...]

[Read more →]

Programmers with little or no exposure to parallelism have an opportunity to learn about multicore programming at the UPCRC Illinois Summer School to be held July 19-23, 2010 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The week-long, intensive workshop will provide a solid foundation in the fundamentals of multicore programming, offer hands-on experience with the use [...]

[Read more →]

The first textbook of its kind, Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach launches today, authored by Dr. David B. Kirk, NVIDIA Fellow and former chief scientist, and Dr. Wen-mei Hwu, who serves at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, co-director of the [...]

[Read more →]

The 16th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA) and 15th ACM SIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP 2010) were held in Bangalore, India between January 9th and 14th. These are two premier conferences covering research in a wide range of topics in high-performance computer architecture and parallel programming.
There [...]

[Read more →]

By Ryan Paul
The USPTO awarded search giant Google a software method patent that covers the principle of distributed MapReduce, a strategy for parallel processing that is used by the search giant. If Google chooses to aggressively enforce the patent, it could have significant implications for some open source software projects that use the technique, including [...]

[Read more →]

In industry surveys, more than 80% of embedded systems software developers report using either C or C++ as their primary programming language. Yet as a group, they earned a failing grade on a multiple-choice evaluation of their firmware-related C knowledge.
In December of 2007, an Embedded C Quiz was launched online as part of a redesigned [...]

[Read more →]

by David Mackay
Libraries play an important role in threading software to run faster on Intel multi-core platforms.
Multi-core platforms are the default computer platforms sold throughout the world. On a multi-core platform there are multiple processors contained on a single chip. That is, each chip has multiple cores that are each [...]

[Read more →]

by Cameron Hughes, Tracey Hughes
In the basic sequential model of programming, a computer program’s instructions are executed one at a time. Each task is performed in a specified order, and each task stands in line and must wait its turn.
This changes when the software requirements include multithreading or multiprocessing components. When parallel processing is called [...]

[Read more →]

CAPS, a leading global provider of compiler technologies and engineering services for parallel hybrid
computing, has announced that Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will use CAPS’ HMPP
compiler to leverage the computing power of a graphics processing unit (GPU)-based hybrid cluster.
As a world leader in high-performance computing (HPC), ORNL is preparing the future of next-
generation petascale computing [...]

[Read more →]

by Christian Hergert
Traditional problems in Mutli-Processor programming
As we reached the speed-limit of serialized CPU instructions we started to add more cores. Obviously, adding more cores means we have to change how we process information. Instead of optimizing for the fastest serial processing of data, we look for ways to split the work into multiple tasks. [...]

[Read more →]

By Richard Gerber, Aart J.C. Bik, Kevin Smith and Xinmin Tian
Parallelization using threads on multiple logical processors is an attractive and effective way to optimize software. As technologies to simulate multiple processors (such as Hyper Threading) and processors containing multiple cores become the standard for even consumer level computing, the importance of parallelization becomes apparent.
To [...]

[Read more →]

By Timothy Prickett Morgan
With Nvidia getting most of the attention when it comes to the use of graphics cards and GPU co-processors to boost the number-crunching capability of workstations and servers, it’s hard for Advanced Micro Devices to get a word in edgewise. Perhaps that’s why AMD waited until the holiday news dead zone to [...]

[Read more →]

By David Mackay
“At times threaded software requires some critical sections, mutexes or locks. Do developers always know which of the objects in their code has the most impact? If I want to examine my software to minimize the impact or restructure data to eliminate some of these synchronization objects and [...]

[Read more →]

by Mario Hewardt
The Windows operating system is a preemptive and multithreaded operating system. Multithreading refers to the capability to run any number of threads concurrently. If the system is a single processor machine, Windows creates the illusion of concurrent thread execution by allowing each thread to run for a short period of time (known as [...]

[Read more →]

Accelerator V2, currently a preview build, is a .NET managed library easing the task of writing data-parallel programs executed on multi-core CPUs and GPUs.
A Microsoft Research project, Accelerator was started back in 2006 as a managed library, the first version being available in 2007. Initially it was written in C# and targeted at GPUs. In [...]

[Read more →]

CoWare, Inc., the leading supplier of Electronic System Virtualization™ (ESV) software and services, and Tensilica, Inc., the leading provider of configurable dataplane processor cores (DPUs), announced they have collaborated to further enhance the integration of Tensilica’s processor models into the CoWare tools to support CoWare’s advanced functionality to ease software development on multi-core Tensilica-based SOC [...]

[Read more →]

By Eric Lai
During a revealing and often humorous panel discussion on the future of programming at last week’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft’s superstar developers espoused their loyalty to old-school methods of coding software.
Herb Sutter, lead designer of Microsoft’s C++/CLI programming language, predict that writing code to run on bare metal [...]

[Read more →]