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Grid Processing

Posted by Hemos on from the all-together-now dept.

c1ay writes "We've all heard the new buzzword, "grid computing" quite a bit in the news recently. Now the EE Times reports that a team of computer architects at the University of Texas here plans to develop prototypes of an adaptive, gridlike processor that exploits instruction-level parallelism. The prototypes will include four Trips(Tera-op Reliable Intelligently Adaptive Processing System) processors, each containing 16 execution units laid out in a 4 x 4 grid. By the end of the decade, when 32-nanometer process technology is available, the goal is to have tens of processing units on a single die, delivering more than 1 trillion operations per second. In an age where clusters are becoming more prevalent for parallel computing I've often wondered where the parallel processor was. How about you?"

2 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Just out of curiosity.... by exebeoex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A question for anyone with such experience:

    I assume it would be somewhat difficult to program efficiently for such systems. I don't mean just getting programs to run, but getting the most bang for your buck. Can anyone here confirm or deny this? Also does anyone know where to find resources on the topic of programming such machines (and no, I am not talking about smp docs or bewoulf docs or even pvm docs)?

  2. What about Transputers? by Tangurena · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Transputers were processors designed from the ground up for parallel processing. Have been around for years, but no one in America noticed them. Therefore they did not exist. I am surprised at the constant reinvention of the wheel, because of the NIH principle (Not Invented Here).

    There are some programming languages designed for parallelism. Biggest hassle is efficiently partitioning problems into something parallel. Not all problems can be done faster by doing more of it at once.