When the semiconductor industry was turning to multicore chips and lowering clock rates, Herb Sutter wrote a seminal article entitled “The Free Lunch is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software.” Up to that point software developers relied on the increasing clock speeds (the “free lunch”) to give their software a boost in the next generation [...] Read more
I was intrigued by the teaser for the IEEE- USA Today’s Engineer story “The Real Steel: Robotics Careers Ready to Boom”. It cited a market research report that claimed there would be 1 million new jobs added due to the robotics industry over the next 5 years. Many of these jobs will come from obvious sources like [...] Read more
Have we already hit the maximum number of cores that can be put in our processors? Or have the needs of the user and developer communities been served at sixteen cores? Read more
While trying to find an answer to my previous question, I stumbled across the paper “Extending Amdahl’s Law for Energy-Efficient Computing in the Many-Core Era” (Computer, Dec. 2008, pp. 24-31) by Dong Hyuk Woo and Hsien-Hsin S. Lee (Georgia Institute of Technology). The title had me thinking that this might be an investigation into finding [...] Read more
Say your boss comes to you and tells you to ensure that the software project you are working on is energy efficient. (Go ahead, I’ll wait while you say it.) There are all kinds of ideas to be found on the Power Efficiency Community site on how to accomplish this assignment. What I’d like to [...] Read more
I’ve known Prof. Tom Murphy for a few years now. Whenever we were at a conference or other event together and had dinner, he invariably would ask the wait staff if they had two corks he could have. If the place served wine, it wasn’t too difficult to find two corks that were the same size [...] Read more
Since I don’t have a smartphone (and am not in the market for one), I don’t typically care what new features get put into the latest models. That is, unless it is cool and interesting. When I first saw commercials for the Apple iPhone S and Siri, I thought it must have been a recreation [...] Read more
A chapter has closed on my career here at Intel. I hope this post isn’t too maudlin. Read more
I was reading Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists by Noson S. Yanofsky and Mirco A. Mannucci while I was on the treadmill last night. I started out reading the description of Shor’s algorithm (for factoring integers) and thought that implementing this on a classical computer (in parallel, of course) would make an interesting problem for the Intel [...] Read more
I saw an announcement of the Gordon supercomputer in an online Wired article. What made the new installation at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) noteworthy wasn’t the size of the machine or that the machine debuted at #48 on the TOP500 list. No, it was the fact that Gordon is the world’s first supercomputer [...] Read more
I knew this day was coming, but you’re never prepared for it. I was in Portland, OR, for an internal Intel conference. Before the meeting got started, I arrived early and decided to browse Powell’s Books. The technical store’s location has changed and the name seems to now be Powell’s #2, so I wanted to see what [...] Read more
I got a bit of a shock this morning. On the front page of the local newspaper (and the online version, too) was the story about IBM pulling out of the Blue Waters project with NCSA. (HPCwire covered it here.) The main reason for IBM’s decision is reported to be due to the project no [...] Read more
Have you ever been confronted and confused by too many choices? Seven Deadly Sins? Thirty-one flavors? 5000 fingers of Dr. T? 10,000 Maniacs? Sometimes it is enough to make you throw up your hands in surrender and not do anything. Now, there is help for the parallel programmer that feels she has too many options [...] Read more
Is there still money to be made from cyber-squatting or tradename-squating? Maybe, but only if you can guess product names for future technology and products. Read more
