From The Register: The multicore future, and how to survive it.

From the EE Times, a new Sun (Oracle?) 128 thread, 16 core device called Rainbow Falls. IBM is also producing the Power7 PowerPC-based 128 thread, 8 core device built into a 4-device module: Sun, IBM push multicore boundaries

It seems clear that multicore will be playing a key role in modern supercomputing. Dan Reid’s blog posting (reproduced in CACM) titled When Petascale is Just Too Slow has a bit worth quoting at the end:

I believe it is time for us to move from our deus ex machina model of explicitly managed resources to a fully distributed, asynchronous model that embraces component failure as a standard occurrence. To draw a biological analogy, we must reason about systemic, organism health and behavior rather than cellular signaling and death, and not allow cell death (component failure) to trigger organism death (system failure). Such a shift in world view has profound implications for how we structure the future of international high-performance computing research, academic-government-industrial collaborations and system procurements.

Perhaps the necessities of programming very (very) large systems may force some of the software issues currently hamstringing multicore.

Somehow I missed this one, too. Cilk is also now a part of Intel: Intel now has Cilk inside.

The multicore world, like much of the business world, has be quiet lately. But this interesting bit of news came through the HPC Wire. It seems there was no press release by either Intel nor RapidMind: RapidMind Gets Swallowed by Intel