http://www.concertant.com/articles.html This is an RSS2.0 feed of articles written by Concertant. Fri, 8 Aug 2008 08:44:01 BST en-gb http://www.concertant.com/Articles/cashingInOnParallelism.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/cashingInOnParallelism.html Thu, 7 Aug 2008 17:02:00 BST Recent articles on the Intel and AMD quad-core offerings have focused on memory hierarchy and the cache structure in particular. This has sparked a discussion about who is “stealing” ideas from whom. The quad-core Intel Nehalem will see small per-core Level 1 (64 KB) and Level 2 (256 KB) caches connected to a big, shared Level 3 (8 MB) cache. This architecture will be used for devices with up to 8 cores. Some observers are saying that this follows what has been done in the AMD Phenom; others are pointing out that L3 shared cache is old Intel server technology anyway, as used in the K10m architecture. Does this really matter? Isn’t there a more important point underlying all these developments? http://www.concertant.com/Articles/isStandardisationWorthTheHassle.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/isStandardisationWorthTheHassle.html Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:49:09 BST In an area of fast moving technology one must ask the question “Is standardisation too long-winded a process to cope with rapid evolution”. Current standardisation processes typically cause review of a standard about every five years with implementation of the revised and updated standard about five years later. This often spills over to be far longer, so that the cycle can be ten to twelve years – by which time the standard is once more out of date. I am not just thinking about software here, but the whole gamut of standardisation. Of course software is notorious for its language wars and delayed releases. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/PicoChip.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/PicoChip.html Mon, 9 Jun 2008 14:12:30 BST One of the unsung heroes of the multicore revolution is UK-based PicoChip. Self-described as “a startup in 2001” the company has been supplying multiprocessor cores for a number of years and is currently shipping at the rate of about one hundred thousand processors per year. In its PC2xx series each processor has up to 296 cores, with hardware resources on-chip to assist with specific functions required for cryptography, Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs), correlations, and the like. It is also possible to chain processors together to meet throughput requirements. Some variants also include an integrated ARM processor. It is, thus, very much an example of what we have hitherto called an HFC (high functionality computing) processor. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/moreThreadsMoreTrouble.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/moreThreadsMoreTrouble.html Tue, 13 May 2008 19:00:00 BST As I think most people in the computer industry are now aware, we have moved from a period of computers having ever-increasing clock speeds, to a period of computers having ever-increasing core count. Although today’s workstations and laptops only have 2 or 4 core processors, the days of having 64, 256, 2048 cores are rapidly approaching. Of course, mainframes and supercomputers have had this level of parallelism for many years, but the crucial difference is that this sort of processor count is now widespread and not the preserve of just a small, elite part of the business. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/nvidiaChangesTheGame.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/nvidiaChangesTheGame.html Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:43:00 BST David Kirk, Chief Scientist at NVIDIA, is on the offensive. It is a very charming offensive, and it seems his message is a very compelling one. The summary is “GPGPU is dead, GPU Computing is the future for affordable supercomputing”. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/paradisePostponed.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/paradisePostponed.html Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:01:00 GMT The late 1980s seemed to herald the dawn of a golden age of parallelism. Let’s call it Paradise! http://www.concertant.com/Articles/pervasiveSoftwaresDatarush.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/pervasiveSoftwaresDatarush.html Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:01:00 GMT Pervasive Software (NADAQ: PVSW) is company that many of us may have come across in the past. They have been around for some twenty-five years in the database and search businesses, going back to SoftCraft in the early eighties and then Btrieve with its eponymous ISAM product, subsequently becoming Pervasive Software. The company has been quoted for about a decade. Our interest in them arises because their Datarush product is targeted at doing heavy searching and data analysis on large databases running on multi-core based systems. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/willFunctionalProgrammingHaveARenaissance.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/willFunctionalProgrammingHaveARenaissance.html Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:01:00 GMT In the 1980s and 1990s the war between declarative programming and imperative programming was eventually won by object-oriented programming. Declarative programming was represented by logic programming with Prolog, and by functional programming with languages like Scheme, Erlang and Haskell. Imperative programming was represented by the heirs of structured programming, all based on abstract data types, of which the object oriented languages such as C++ and Smalltalk were the favoured languages of the time. And then came Java and that was it, imperative, and object-oriented in particular, won. Or did it? http://www.concertant.com/Articles/dWaveAndQuantumComputation.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/dWaveAndQuantumComputation.html Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:01:00 GMT D-Wave (http://www.dwavesys.com/) has recently received $17m in C-round funding from International Investment and Underwriting (IIU) of Dublin, with the active support of its earlier investors. The Company says that it will use the funds for product development, operations, and business development. This investment is clearly a long-term one: the investors are investing in the intellectual property for future development rather than a system close to being ready to go to market. One must praise them for taking such a pragmatic view. After all, the technical issues surrounding quantum computing (QC) are manifold and are not about to be resolved in the short term, so the investors are backing what has to be seen as a high risk venture. That being said the partner list shown at Supercomputing’07 looked impressive. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/mobileCommunicationsPicoChipAndMCPs.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/mobileCommunicationsPicoChipAndMCPs.html Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:01:00 GMT This week sees the Mobile Industry’s annual get-together, The Mobile World Congress – formerly 3GSM – in Barcelona. Among the many participants is UK-based picoChip. They have just announced their PC8808 reference design, which represents the first fruits of its new Beijing design office, as well as collaborations with mimoOn and Continuous Computing. In the none too distant past picoChip announced input of funds from Samsung as well as its PC20x range. Red Herring named picoChip in its “Global 100” awards last year. Clearly a small British company expanding to play a global role. Why is this interesting to us? Because the heart of picoChip&rlquo;s products is a massively-parallel multicore architecture. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/threadsAreTheProblemNotTheSolution.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/threadsAreTheProblemNotTheSolution.html Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:01:00 GMT As we are all aware, processor manufacturers stopped increasing the clock speed of processors, buses, and memory to get increased performance. The main problem is the inability to dissipate the heat generated by increasingly fast processors. We are now getting multicore processors and are being told that having more cores is the modern way of increasing the number of instructions executed per second. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/theProblemWithMulticoreProcessorMarketing.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/theProblemWithMulticoreProcessorMarketing.html Mon, 4 Feb 2008 00:01:00 GMT As we are probably all aware now, multi-core processors are the new black. Increasing the clock speed of the processor in your computer has been replaced by increasing the number of cores in your computer. The aim is to increase performance so that bigger and better applications can run. However the sales pitch could be just vacuous hype. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/problemWhatProblem.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/problemWhatProblem.html Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:01:00 GMT Multi-core processors and GPGPUs (general purpose graphics processor units) now have an extremely high profile. Intel, AMD, IBM and others have, in effect, declared that processor architectures cannot be run at faster clock speeds. We are now told to use more cores to achieve greater performance. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/FPGAs_greenerFasterComputing.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/FPGAs_greenerFasterComputing.html Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:01:00 BST The move towards greener computing, which uses less power, the emergence of a range of disruptive technologies, which support this move, and developments in the market for high-performance embedded systems have once again brought field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) into focus http://www.concertant.com/Articles/quadcores_endOfALine.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/quadcores_endOfALine.html Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:01:00 BST Intel and AMD have both made announcements of new processors in the past couple of weeks, attempting to steal each other's thunder. Intel has announced the last Xeon Cores and AMD has released the first of its Barcelona processors. Both sets are quad-cores; in the former case a pair of coupled dual-cores and in the latter a “full” quad core. Let's start by acknowledging the engineering feats that been achieved in building both these product lines and in evolving them to their present state of refinement. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/tilera_2007-08-30.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/tilera_2007-08-30.html Thu, 30 Aug 2007 01:01:00 BST Late August is generally the doldrums of the annual news cycle. Unusual then to find a newcomer to the market making new announcements that may turn out to be of great importance to the micro-processor industry. Whatever the reasoning, Tilera chose the tail end of this month to announce its TILE64 family of sixty-four element multi-core processors. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/legacies.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/legacies.html Sat, 14 Jul 2007 01:01:00 BST What to do with old code is one of the most familiar – and dreaded - problems in computing. Whether it is programs of “genuine historical importance”, or whether it is those applications that you just need to have around “because”. . . they all need to be ported to the new system. Can they run on it without effort or will a lot of work have to be done to make it execute at all? And will it integrate with the new applications from X, and so on and so on? http://www.concertant.com/Articles/googleAndPeakStream.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/googleAndPeakStream.html Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:01:00 BST Recent reports in the Press have Google acquiring PeakStream Inc. According to some sources PeakStreams products will no longer be available. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/highPerformanceOrHighFunctionality.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/highPerformanceOrHighFunctionality.html Fri, 4 May 2007 01:01:00 BST Readers of these pages will have noticed that Concertant is described as being both an HPC and an HFC practice. While HPC clearly stands for High Performance Computing, what does HFC mean? The answer is High Functionality Computing. An odd thing to link to HPC? perhaps not. Read on. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/survey_2006.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/survey_2006.html Tue, 24 Apr 2007 01:01:00 BST The last few years have seen PC processors as well as those in servers and other systems become increasingly power-hungry. The response of designers has been to deploy multiple cores on a single chip to achieve the same or greater levels of performance as previously but at lower power levels. These multi-core processors (MCPs) offer the potential of very large performance increases without the expected increases in power consumption and radiated heat. The drawback is the need for new management and applications development technologies to deal with the issues that they raise. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/AMDandNVIDIA.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/AMDandNVIDIA.html Thu, 1 Feb 2007 00:01:00 GMT The last few weeks have seen both AMD and NVIDIA announce that the GPU is the new CPU: AMD announced ‘stream processors’ before, and NVIDIA announced CUDA at, SuperComputing'06. Clearly the announcements were timed to compete with one another, but which market they are actually addressing is not entirely clear. The announcements we made in a high-performance computing (HPC) event, but they do not really address HCP issues directly. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/whyMCPAtAll.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/whyMCPAtAll.html Mon, 5 Feb 2007 00:01:00 GMT MCPs (Multi-Core Processors) are the latest buzz phrase in processor marketing, although in truth they have been around in various forms for several years. MCPs are processors which have several cores or processing units on a single chip. These replace the traditional Central Processing Unit (CPU). MCPs are processors which contain not one processor but several, some of which may be specially designed to perform certain operations very efficiently. http://www.concertant.com/Articles/historicalBackground.html http://www.concertant.com/Articles/historicalBackground.html Sun, 11 Feb 2007 00:01:00 GMT The traditional perception of a computer is of a single processor, the central processing unit (CPU), processing information. Applications were written that had a single path of execution through them since there was a single CPU. In order to run multiple applications at the same time, operating systems had to use multi-tasking techniques to offer time on the CPU amongst all the concurrently executing applications. As applications got more complicated, and people wanted to run more and more applications at the same time, processor and memory speeds had to get faster, and memory capacity had to get bigger. But we had Moore's Law on our side (Moore's Law was an empirical observation that the performance, and density of components, in a single chip doubled every 18 months). Chip manufacturers made bigger and faster chips despite all the concerns that we were getting close to physical limits.