SIG-SYS Fall 2008 - Talk on 11/12/2008

Title: Multi-core processors: how to program them effectively?

Speaker: Daniele P. Scarpazza
Cell Solutions, IBM T.J. Watson Research

Abstract:
Multi-core processors are revolutionizing the world of computing: the growths of frequency and complexity seem to have hit insurmountable physical walls, and thus designers are instead putting more and more cores on a single chip, in an attempt to provide ever-increasing computing power. This focus on throughput and parallelism represents a major shift in the design of mainstream computers. The IBM Cell/B.E. processor is a highly representative, early example of this growing trend, with its nine cores and its impressive arithmetic throughput of more than 100 billion double-precision floating point operations per second (or 200 billion single-precision ones).

Is this growth sustainable? What kind of multi-cores will we see in the future? Are traditional programming models capable of exploiting this power? Are software developers ready to "think parallel"? How will we program multi-cores in five years?

To answer these questions, Daniele will discuss in detail some of the lessons learned on the IBM Cell/B.E. processor from exploring algorithms such as graph exploration, string and regular expression matching, information indexing, and more.

Daniele Scarpazza's Short Bio:

Daniele is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Cell Solutions Department of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, NY. He works on parallel algorithms and programming abstractions for multi-core processors, with an emphasis on pattern matching, information retrieval, and efficient management of large data structures.

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