Intel Parallel Studio anounced

Intel has announced a set of tools for parallel programming collectivelly named “Parallel Studio”. Some information is available here.

A beta is currently available at http://www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na/eng/399359.htm and it is expected that the final product will be available by mid-2009.

The set of products covers from the parallelization of current code to debuggin and performance analysis and it is currently targeted to the Windows platform.

News from Intel Developer Conference

I read in this article at HPCWire, some news from the Intel Developers Conference. Most of the article gives some details about Nehalem and Tukwila processor families.

Intel VP Pat Gelsinger stated there that “This, we believe, is a powerful aspect of the Internet of the future, the embedded Internet where every human on the planet is connected to the Internet 7-by-24 in every modality of life — how they work, how they play, how they learn and even when they rest.”

Bit money for manufacturers, but also new challenges for software developers, as the “standard computer” will not be anymore the typical scenario for software to run.

The death of the hard disk (some day)

The latest issue of the Queue magazine, is devoted to flash memories as a substitute technology for hard disks.

This substitution is something we should see in the next years (how many?). Specially interesting is the article about the changes of Jim Gray’s rule of five minutes. Enjoy!

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center has a new prototype to investigate the supercomputing of the future

I read in a press release of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, that they already have a prototype for their next generation supercomputer: MariCel. The expected performance is, at least, 10 Petaflops.

Intel Lifts the Curtain on Larrabee

Some details about the Larrabee processor given at HPCWire:

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Intel_Lifts_the_Curtain_on_Larrabee.html

It seems it will be primarily intended for the GPU market. However, no details yet exist about the number of core (although it will be many-core).

Think Parallel: Teaching Parallel Programming Today

Today I found this interesting article in DS Online.

http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/pages/dsonline/2008/08/o8002edu.html

In her article Ami Marowka states that “parallel computing courses, theory, and practice must be taught as early as possible“.

I am not quite sure if as soon as possible must be “from the begining”. However, a great effort should be done to make students view that parallel programming is not only an issue for scientific computations at supercomputing centers. Parallel computing is already at many devices including desktops.

Europe’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) training and education needs revealed in comprehensive survey

To remain competitive at the cutting edge of simulation science, Europe’s top computational scientists will be required to harness the huge computing potential offered by Petascale computing architectures which can deliver over one quadrillion calculations per second (to put this into perspective, a quadrillion strands of hair laid side-by-side would stretch 50,000,000 km). Unfortunately, traditional training materials may not now be enough to instruct users on how to fully exploit these complex systems comprising potentially hundreds of thousands of powerful processing elements, large memories, fast communication interconnections, and sophisticated supporting software.

http://www.prace-project.eu/news/europe2019s-high-performance-computing-hpc-training-and-education-needs-revealed-in-comprehensive-survey

Intel Plans Chip to Boost Computer Performance

Intel’s new Larrabee processor, which features more than 10 processor cores, will boost computer performance by adding more cores instead of increasing the chip’s operating frequency. By 2015, the strategy of running chips at increasingly higher frequencies could create products that generate as much heat as a nuclear reactor, according to engineers, so multi-core processing is largely considered the future of computing. “There is a fundamental physics issue we can no longer get around,” says Intel’s Anwar Ghuloum. “If we kept going as we had been, the heat density on a chip would have equaled the surface of the sun.” The first products based on the Larrabee chip are expected to be released in 2009 or 2010. The problem with the multi-core approach is that it will require an equally dramatic shift in software. To utilize the processing power contained in a multi-core chip, software will need to be divided into chucks of instructions that can run in parallel on multiple processors. Once chips with 10 cores are available in consumer products, much of today’s existing software may have to be rewritten to take advantage of the extra processing capabilities. New programming languages are being developed and technology leaders are encouraging university computer science departments to strengthen their parallel processing coursework.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/03/AR2008080302021.html

Serial computing is dead; the future is parallelism

Serial computing is dead, and the parallel computing revolution has begun: Are you part of the solution, or part of the problem?

Article at searchdatacenter.com http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci1319113,00.html.

Starting the blog

Welcome to the “News on Computing” blog. Some times in the past I have been posting some news I found about computing in my personal web page (supercomputing, trends in computing job market, multicore, …). Now I will try to put those things here.

Note that this is not a general blog, but a blog about some issues on computing I am interested on.