Geneseo is the codename for an enhancement to PCI Express. Lead by Intel and IBM, this technology will make it easier for co-processor vendors to produce accelerator cards. Among other improvements, Geneseo includes new semantics that reduce the overhead of signaling and synchronization, which makes more efficient interaction between the application software and the accelerator […]
Archives for September 2006
What is stream programming?
September 21, 2006 by
A stream is an array whose elements can be operated on in parallel, similar to SIMD computing. In stream programming, data is gathered from memory into a stream, operated on in the stream, and then scattered from the stream back into memory. Memory latency is thus minimized by accessing the data in chunks, similar in […]
What are grand challenge problems?
September 16, 2006 by
Grand challenge problems refer to really difficult tasks that stretch the limits of cognitive ability. They are especially popular in high technology fields as working towards a solution often yields many new applications. Below are a list of some open problems, along with correlations to previously solved grand challenges. Prove NP ≠ P This is […]
What is Roadrunner?
September 10, 2006 by
Not to be confused with Time Warner’s broadband Internet access provider, Roadrunner will be the first supercomputer to use the Cell BE (see earlier post on the PS3 as a cluster node). The unique architecture calls for inclusion of Opteron processors as well, which means that the system will be able to run a broad […]
What is software pipelining?
September 2, 2006 by
Most computer architectures today are able to execute a few instructions in parallel on a single core by having multiple control and arithmetic-logic units. The order of execution may be scheduled by the compiler (in a VLIW processor) or by the hardware itself (in a superscalar processor). Of course not all instructions can be executed […]
