A group of Japanese researchers are collaborating on a software standard for multicore processors to be used in a range of technology products, including mobile phones and in-vehicle navigation systems. The effort could lead to the development of a super CPU, according to the researchers.
First reported in Japanese publication Nikkei Business News early this month, [...]

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by Thom Holwerda
Most of us are probably aware of Singularity, a research operating system out of Microsoft Research which explored a number of new ideas, which is available as open source software. Singularity isn’t the only research OS out of Microsoft; they recently released the first snapshot of a new operating system, called Barrelfish. It [...]

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Researchers have developed a ‘hybrid microchip’ that could advance electronics beyond the limits of Moore’s Law. According to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years, leading to an exponential improvement in electronics. However, as devices get smaller, it is increasingly difficult for manufacturers to continue the trend on [...]

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Special Issue of Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing on “Data Intensive Computing” invites original unpublished research articles that describe recent advances and efforts in the design and development of data intensive computing, functionalities and capabilities that will benefit many applications.
Important Dates
Paper Submission : January 15, 2010
Notification of Acceptance/Rejection : May 31, 2010
Final Version of [...]

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By Antone Gonsalves
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing a faster processor without having to shrink the size of its circuitry, a technique used by today’s chip makers.
MIT’s advancement in chip-making, which involves combining two semiconductor materials into a single hybrid microchip, is important because today’s manufacturers will eventually hit a limit on [...]

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Researchers are gaining traction in their efforts to beat a path to programming tomorrow’s many-core microprocessors. In a Monday (August 24) session at the Hot Chips conference, three top labs will give what amounts to their first report cards on a task many have characterized as the most ambitious in the history of computer science.
Researchers [...]

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By Christopher Mims
Computer scientists are ditching graphics clusters for visualizing the world’s most gigantic datasets.
Before specialized graphics-processing chips existed, pioneers in the field of visualization used multicore supercomputers to realize data in three dimensions. Today, however, the speed at which supercomputers can process data is rapidly outstripping the speed at which they can input and [...]

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Here are the slides from a talk at MIT in April 2009 by Guy Steele, Fellow at Sun Microsystems Labs. The title of the talk is The Future of Parallel: What’s a Programmer to Do?”. The talk was focused about Breaking sequential habits of thought.
Presentation Slides [pdf]

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by Andrew Binstock
Visualization software relies substantially on the ability to process large amounts of data in parallel. Complex parallel processing, however, can be difficult to do efficiently using native threads. So, what are the practical alternatives?
Visualization applications often need to represent figuratively or graphically features of large volumes of data. Whether visualization is used in [...]

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Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have developed a microprocessor based on the ARC600 32-bit configurable architecture from ARC International plc. (St. Albans, England). A working prototype has been demonstrated in the laboratory.
The microprocessor has been named EnCore and it is touted as being capable of reducing power consumption of portable gadgets such as MP3 [...]

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The 2009 Symposium on Application Accelerators in HPC will be held in July (20th to 30th) in Urbana, IL.
“What do GPUs, FPGAs, vector processors and other exotic special-purpose chips have in common? They are advanced processor architectures that the scientific community is using to accelerate computationally demanding applications. While high-performance computing systems that use [...]

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Catamount N-Way (CNW) Lightweight Kernel, developed at Sandia National Laboratories wins this year’s R&D 100 awards. This leverages hardware capabilities of multicore processors to deliver significant improvements in data access performance for parallel computing applications. CNW provides enhanced data access capabilities beyond other equivalent operating systems by employing a new technique that targets memory bandwidth, [...]

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The 36th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA ‘09) was held in Austin, between June 20th and 24th. ISCA is generally viewed as the top-tier academic conference on Computer Architecture. Many of multicore related papers are available online in Research Papers page.
Some interesting multicore related papers:
* Architecting Phase Change Memory as a Scalable DRAM [...]

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We provided many resources of parallel programming tutorials. The following are the ones we have linked so far.
Basic parallel computing tutorial
MapReduce tutorial
Cell processor programming
OpenMP tutorial
PThreads Tutorials
Intel Threading Building Blocks
In Part 7, we visit Message Passing Interface (MPI), the de facto standard for writing parallel programs running on a distributed memory system, such as a compute [...]

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By James Truchard, National Instruments
Throughout history, lots of important and crucial innovation has happened during economic hard times and recession. Let’s take a look back at the greatest recession of all time–the Great Depression. Two major engineering inventions came out of those very bleak times, Scotch Tape and the fluorescent light bulb. Hewlett Packard was [...]

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The Defense Department wants to take supercomputing to the next level by funding the development of a new breed of supercomputers that will be smarter and faster and yet smaller and require much less power than today’s massive machines.
DOD officials believe such computers will be necessary to make sense of the avalanche of data that [...]

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The academy in charge of advancing China’s homegrown microprocessors has licensed the MIPS chip architecture, burying an old controversy over its use of parts of the MIPS instruction set. China’s Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) has licensed the MIPS32 and MIPS64 architectures for development of its Godson chips, MIPS Technologies said Monday.
The Godson chip [...]

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If you have a laptop, you’ve been there: While the manufacturer promised hours of available battery time, you find that after you’ve been working on the laptop for a short time, the screen goes black. Battery dead.
Improving battery life is the pursuit of many scientists around the world, but computer scientists at the McCormick School [...]

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SEEING THE BIG PICTURE, Intel says it will channel $12 million into a visual computing institute (VCI) in Saarland University in Germany, over the next five years.
Chipzilla’s cash splash-out is the largest amount the firm has ever spent on university collaboration, showing how important advanced graphics and visual computing technologies are becoming to the CPU [...]

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From Microsoft’s website, Axum is a programming language that aims to validate a safe and productive parallel programming model for .NET. It’s a language that builds upon the architecture of the web and the principles of isolation, actors, and message-passing to increase application safety, responsiveness, scalability and developer productivity.
As an incubation project, Microsoft has made [...]

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