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June 4, 2011
The Economist on Multicore Pushing Problems onto Software Writers
The Economist Babbage Podcast - May 18, 2011 - The Economist magazine's Babbage weekly podcast about science and technology discusses Gordon Moore's Law in light of the latest advances in three-dimensional chip construction. While they observe that this is the latest in a series of techniques chip makers use to maintain Moore's original observation about transistor densities, that leads them straight to the consequences for software. Some quotes:
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•"The problem there is that actually pushes the need for continual progress onto the software industry."
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•"What used to be quite an obscure programming problem for supercomputers and academics, which is 'how to you reliably and efficiently take advantage of massively parallel computers', is starting to become a real problem on the desktop."
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•"If software doesn't take advantage of these cores, then Intel can go on pushing out chips that have more and more processing cores inside them but the software won't be getting any faster, and we'll have this growing gap between what my computer is theoretically capable of and what it actually does."
These words are spoken beautifully and succinctly in this excerpt. We made the same prediction years ago here and here.
Update: The Economist didn't stop there. Their June 4, 2011, issue shows they expanded on it more in Parallel Bars article in their Technology Quarterly: "There has been so little progress in parallel programming, even though multicore chips have been widespread for five years."
November 1, 2011
SET™ v1 Announced
Advanced Cluster Systems, Inc. (ACS) announced a new software solution that parallelizes modular sequential software applications, enabling optimal performance on multi-core platforms and clusters. The United States Patent and Trademark Office recently granted ACS a rare “no prior art” patent for their breakthrough technology: Supercomputing Engine Technology™ or SET™.
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