By Dan Driscoll and Stephen Olsen, Mentor Graphics Corporation
Multicore is becoming increasingly popular in today’s embedded systems. In order to circumvent the physical limitations of silicon design, stacking up multiple homogenous or heterogeneous processors is often a preferred approach. This is particularly true for many convergent devices that require media-rich graphics, always-on functionality, multi-band connectivity, [...]

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By Timothy Prickett Morgan
ScaleMP, a maker of virtualization and aggregation software that allows a cluster of x64 servers to look like a big, bad, symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) shared-memory system to operating systems and selected classes of applications, is going downstream to target SMBs and upstream to chase cloud infrastructure providers.
While ScaleMP wants to make a [...]

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Multi-core processing is rapidly becoming a necessity in embedded computing with the convergence of two conflicting trends: demand for high density storage and a requirement for smaller footprints. To address this demand for increased storage and smaller real estate, manufacturers are turning to MLC NAND. Consumers refuse to pay the performance penalty that often accompanies [...]

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Market research company In-Stat (Scottsdale, Ariz.) is offering a 14-page “white paper” on the fight between processor companies ARM and Intel on the mobile Internet battlefield.
Among the findings discussed here is that processor market for devices with Internet connectivity have a potential for growth with an overall compounded annual growth rate of 22.3 percent through [...]

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By Tomas Evensen, Chief Technology Officer, Wind River
Here is the abstract of a white paper from Wind River’s CTO, titled, “Multicore Challenges and Choices: Deciding Which Solution is Right for You”.
“Multicores are here to stay. It is a matter of physics. To effectively take advantage of the new multicore processors, it is better to use [...]

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Here is the abstract of a white paper on an Introduction to Embedded multicore from Freescale. You probably need to register to download.
“The computer industry is driven by pursuit of ever increasing performance. From high-end customized special-purpose computing in networking, telecommunications, and avionics to low-power embedded computing in desktop computing, portable computing and video games, [...]

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By Jens Wiegand (Wind River Systems, Inc.)
The world of medical electronics is shifting fundamentally. Equipment designs have traditionally lasted 20 years, with years of heritage and testing behind each design. Now more innovation is demanded, with new features and new versions being developed much faster, based on digital systems. More focus is being put on [...]

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Single-core processing has reached its performance ceiling. In response, hardware manufacturers have developed new multi-core (or multi-processor) devices to accomplish the speed gains to which the world had grown accustomed. But this paradigm of multi-threaded software development adds a new wrinkle of complexity; concurrency defects such as race conditions and deadlocks are software defect types [...]

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by Peter Scott
Intel’s spinners have gone out of their way to publish a whitepaper dealing with Larrabee physics performance. Intel claims game physics are the backbone of any “modern game engine which employs the laws of physics to simulate life-like movement and interaction between objects, such as rigid and deformable bodies, [...]

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by Pete Perlegos
While this paper is marketing material from Intel, it makes some good points about the value of moving to multi-core chips and using virtualization to consolidate servers with low utilization
Problem: Most businesses already spend about half as much for the electricity to power and cool their infrastructure as they do for the hardware [...]

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Between April 6th and 8th, the first International Exascale Software Project (IESP) meeting was held. The workshop’s mission is to lay the foundation for Exascale computing by mobilizing the global open source software community to combine and coordinate their collective efforts far more efficiently and effectively than ever before. The IESP will hold a series [...]

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Charteris provides a White Paper that introduces the fundamentals that will allow you to begin writing concurrent applications, and is intended to be easier to read than much of the material on this subject. It is targeted at developers who have some experience of developing on the .NET Framework, and ideally in C# as this [...]

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by Shwetha Doss et al.
Abstract
The performance analysis phase is used to optimize the serial application before introducing threads, and identify where to introduce threads in the application in order to achieve a high performance threaded application. While threading can be a challenge, new software development tools help simplify the process by identifying thread correctness [...]

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by Shwetha Doss et al.
Abstract
Microprocessor design is experiencing a shift away from a predominant focus on pure performance to a balanced approach that optimizes for power as well as performance. Multicore processors are capable of greater performance with optimal power consumption by concurrently sharing work and executing tasks on independent execution cores. One technique to [...]

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EETimes published a news article yesterday about a forecast for cloud computing by leading scientists from Berkeley. Here is the white paper from Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory (RAD Lab).
Abstract:
Provided certain obstacles are overcome, we believe Cloud Computing has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more [...]

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A group of leading computer scientists from Parallel Computing Lab Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory (RAD Lab) published a white paper Thursday (Feb. 12) that lays out a broad road map for cloud computing. They called for a standard application programming interface (API) to spark adoption among a broad set of providers and users.
Cloud computing [...]

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Intel has a Multithreading Consistency Guide to provide guidelines for developing efficient multithreaded applications across Intel-based symmetric multiprocessors (SMP) and/or systems with Hyper-Threading Technology. The motivation of this guide is for an application developer to use the advice in this document to improve multithreading performance and minimize unexpected performance variations on current as well as [...]

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[White Paper]
The computer industry has been rapidly transitioning from CPUs (chips) with a single processing core to CPUs with dual-, quad- and multi-core configurations. This has changed traditional thinking of SMP servers and has propagated to both desktop and laptop systems. Multiple concurrent jobs and multi-threaded applications are techniques to utilize this change. This paper/presentation [...]

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Here is a white paper from TotalView Technologies that describes the challenges of race conditions and other difficult bugs in parallel programming. It introduces a product called ReplayEngine.
Abstract
The hardest step in solving software bugs in a parallel programming environment centers on working backward from a software failure to the original program error. Conventional debugging techniques [...]

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Here is a white paper by Michael Reunert, Sr. Marketing manager , Commercial Segment of RadiSys on Multicore processing and virtualization, and how to enable cost effective servers.
Abstract:
“A number of recent technology advances bring revolutionary change to the computing landscape. Enterprises of all sizes face the challenge of increasing system performance and reliability while [...]

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