An EE Times article from December 12, 2006 described the new 512 core device built for the University of Tokyo Grape-DR system. The device is an array of floating point processors intended to be used in an upcoming supercomputer.
Maya Golkahe of Los Alamos National Labs has a very good presentation on the latest in multicore technology titled Heterogeneous Processing. This file also includes a presentation on GPUs for high performance computing by Pat McCormick. This was presented at the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute (LACSI) Symposium held on October 17 – 19, 2006 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Advanced Micro Devices has announced that it will be opening an Advanced Architecture and Technology Lab in Redmond, Washington (also, perhaps not coincidentally, home of Microsoft). It will be led by Rich Witek and is expected to have a staff of 30 to 40.
In late September of this year, Intel demonstrated an 80 core prototype device described as the “world’s first programmable teraflop processor”.
The Embedded Systems Conference 2007 has a Multicore and Multithreaded Processors track with almost a dozen presentations. The Embedded Systems conference is held in San Jose, CA on April 1 – 5, 2007.
Recently attention has turned to a highly parallel, high-performance, processing unit found in most modern desktop PCs: the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). End users have been exploring using GPUs from ATI and Nvidia to do genreal purpose processing. Two articles on this emerging trend are:
Supercomputing’s Next Revolution by Paul Tulloch, Wired news, Nov. 9, 2006.
and
Number Crunching With GPUs by Tom R. Hatfield, In-Stat Processor Watch, October 2, 2006.
AMD has demonstrated its quad core Opteron in 65 nm silicon. These are expected to begin shipping in the second quarter of 2007.
AMD Demonstrates World’s First Native Quad-Core x86 Server Processor
The Call for Papers for the 2007 Multicore Expo in Santa Clara, CA is open. The deadline for submissions is Jan. 12, 2007.