TheBlogGuideTo HPC,Grid, DataGrid, Virtualisation and Cloud Computing

Interesting Post from Perils of Parallel which outlines Tim Sweeney, found of Epic Games,  keynote at High Performance Graphics 2009 in which, in one of the slides (79), he compares complexity and cost of development. Bottom line according to Tim is:
 
Lessons learned: Today’s hardware is too hard!

If it costs X (time, money, pain) to develop [...]

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Apple’s Grand Central a new set of technologies released with Snow Leopard designed to make parallelisation and concurrency simpler for programmers. Apple has extended Objective-C which now includes support for closures and makes it easier  to implement control structures that support concurrency. In essence Grand Central makes it easier to write parallelisable software.
Similarily Microsoft recently [...]

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AMD have released the Istanbul hex core, 45 nm chip 5 months ahead of schedule. These chips will make a strong challenge to the Intel Nahelem offering in terms of performance Per Watt per square foot and are built on an established architecture. AMD have needed to get back into the market for some time [...]

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The new Atom platform for netbooks/nettops is called Pine Trail. Pine Trail refers to the combination of CPU and chipset. The CPU in this case is the next version of the Atom core. Still based on Intel’s 45nm process, this new Atom (codenamed Pineview) brings both the memory controller and GPU core on-die. The current [...]

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In a bolt from the blue, Oracle have put in a bid to purchase Sun Microsystems. The sparring over they years between the two companies has resulted in a TKO for Larry Ellison and Oracle. Where this leaves Sun’s Cloud Strategy and initiatives such as Java etc remains to be seen.
FreedomOSS published a list [...]

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“Developers of low latency trading and market data applications are likely to benefit from new Intel Xeon 5500 Series microprocessors introduced today. Based on Intel’s new Nehalem architecture, the chips are expected to offer much improved performance and less power consumption compared to current chips, especially in the areas of multi-threading, memory access, interconnect technology [...]

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A good article at Java World outlines the deisgn principles of building cloud ready multicore applications.
“For your applications to meet the demands of computing in a cloud-based, multicore world, you’ll need to design your code with the following attributes in mind:
- Atomicity
- Statelessness
- Idempotence
- Parallelism
In this article, the first of two parts, I’ll discuss each [...]

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Click++ which we covered in our recent round up has published an article  in which they convert a Discrete Hedging example to a parallel Cilk++ program, and increase performance on multicore systems from the popular computational finance library QuantLib.
As a preview of the results They obtained, below is a graph of the results on a 16-core system, [...]

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Jeff Atwood has written a very detailed post on comparing 7zip and bzip2 to compress files, with the underlying hardware being dual quad-core 2.5 GHz Xeon E5420 CPUs. Well worth checking out if we you deal with file compression on your Grid or Network.

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Aaron Tersteeg from Intel has posted some extensive links on the topic of threading for multicore. If you at all are involved in programming for multicore I would urge you to check this out.

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