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Inside Intel's $20M Multicore Research Program
An anonymous reader writes "You may have heard about Intel's and Microsoft's efforts to finally get multi-core programming into gear so that there actually will be a developer who can program all those fancy new multicore processors, which may have dozens of core on one chip within a few years. TG Daily has an interesting article about the project, written by one of the researchers. It looks like there is a lot of excitement around the opportunity to create a new generation of development tools. Let's hope that we will soon see software that can exploit those 16+core babies. 'The problem of multi-core programming is staring at us right now. I am not sure what Intel's and Microsoft's expectations are, but it is quite possible that they are in fact looking at fundamental results from the academic centers to leverage their large work force to polish and realize the ideas that come forth. It calls for a much closer collaboration between the centers and the companies than it appears at first sight.'"
The structure of VHDL is inherently parallel as all processes (blocks of hardware) run at the same time. Only the code within the processes is evaluated sequentially (in most cases).
Although VHDL is a hardware description language, couldn't similar concepts be used to make a parallel centric computer programming language?
Forget software not being written for multi-cores, the entire infrastructure around the computer needs to "go wide" for massive parallelism, not just the software. This includes disk, memory, front-side bus, etc./p>
I'm doing highly concurrent projects (grid computing) for my company and we're finding that some things parallelize just fine, but others simply move the pain and bottleneck to a piece of infrastructure that hasn't quite caught up yet.
For example, my laptop has a dual-core 2.2Ghz processor, which you'd think is great for development. It's no better than a single CPU machine because my disk IO light is on all the time. IntelliJ pounds the disk. Maven and Ant pound the disk. Outlook pounds the disk. Even surfing the web puts pages into disk cache, so browsing while building a project is slow. Until I get a SCSI drive, you're still limited on disk IO, so those extra cores don't help that much.
All the cores are great on the server, though. I've recently completed a massive integration project where I grid-enabled my company's enterprise apps. All those cores running grid nodes is giving us very high throughput. Our next bottleneck is the database (all those extra grid nodes pounding away at another bottleneck resource...)
Terracotta Server as a Message Bus. It's been a very interesting project.