News and Discussion
Multicore: Faster Chips, Slower Computers? · 559 days ago
Fortune magazine has published an article A chip too far?
that explains that “The latest microchips have gotten so complicated that companies from Microsoft to Apple to Intel say software writers can’t keep up. The result could hurt computer sales.”
Senior writer, Michael Copeland, does a great job of explaining the problem in layman’s terms:
The change was set in motion four years ago when Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) and others reached a point where they could no longer make single processors go faster. So they began placing multiple processors (or “cores”) on a single chip instead.
That design, however, dramatically raises the level of difficulty for software developers. If they want to get the full oomph out of multicore chips, their applications need to break tasks apart into chunks for each core to work on, a process known as parallel computing. (Programs running on supercomputers have employed this technique for years to simulate atomic explosions or model complex aerodynamics.)
But programming in parallel is simply too complex for the average code writer, who has been trained in a very linear fashion. In conceptual terms, traditional coding could be compared to a woman being pregnant for nine months and producing a baby. Parallel programming might take nine women, have each of them be pregnant for a month, and somehow produce a baby.
You can read the full article here:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/13/technology/microchips_copeland.fortune/
— Published by Software Pipelines Alliance
So Your Processor has Multiple Cores -- Now What? · 791 days ago
It is nearly impossible today buy servers or desktops that do not have processors with multiple cores.
The use of several cores has gone from an important innovation to a universal feature in two years’ time. (Technically, non-x86 processors had multiple cores before this time frame, but the concept was not mainstream until the x86 vendors — Intel and AMD — picked it up.) As a result of this ubiquity, sites that are buying new servers need to begin considering the effect of multiple cores. Read more…
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Sure, it lets you do more with less, but it's not easy... · 791 days ago
Virtualization and multicore computing are changing traditional software licensing models. Server software is typically licensed per socket or per CPU... Read more…
— Published by Software Pipelines Alliance
Google Fellows reveal parallel processing model · 792 days ago
More than 10 thousand programs have been implemented at Google using MapReduce, which can also be used to parallelize computations for multicore processing… Read more…
— Published by Software Pipelines Alliance
The prescient Amdahl · 792 days ago
This week GCN has a feature story on how programmers can write their programs to get the most out of multicore processors.
The problem is only partially about how to break up the problem in such a way that it uses all the processor cores you have available. That’s complicated enough, but there is an additional trick—you must break up the problem in such a way that any gains in efficiency aren’t eaten up by the overhead it takes to manage the execution across numerous cores.
— Published by Software Pipelines Alliance