ITNews

The new Parallel Computing Lab at the University of California at Berkeley is funded by Intel and Microsoft. UCB beat out MIT, Stanford, and the University of Illinois, for the honors of cracking this tough nut.

The EETimes posting Multicore puts screws to parallel-programming models gives some of the details.

I’ve seen several schemes over the years to harness Symmetric multiprocessing, or SMP, computing cycles. Some highly hand tweaked programs showed what could be done. I don’t think any compiler has been very successful turning generic source code into screaming performers.

The Parallel Computing Laboratory (“Par Lab”) approach is

We decided on a fresh approach: to start top-down from applications; to innovate across disciplinary boundaries by creating a culture that encourages interaction and cooperation; and to create prototypes that can be quickly adapted to reflect multidisciplinary innovation.

I’m looking forward to the prototypes, and seeing how they crack the share-cache and share-nothing multicore nuts.

…John

It was twenty years ago today Larry Wall unleashed the Practical Extract and Report Language, Perl. I’ve been programming with it every since.

…John

The eWeek posting Microsoft Pushes Cloud Development begins by saying

“Microsoft is at work on a project to enable everyday developers to build Web applications, just as easily as folks have built Visual Basic applications over the years. The project to enable this is called Volta and it is headed up by Erik Meijer…”

I have a problem with this statement. Easily is defined as “without difficulty or effort.” Nothing is easy about any programming, not even using Visual Basic, or maybe it is more accurate saying, especially using Visual Basic, since so many incompatible technologies have been folded into it over the years, making it anything but easy.

Check out the Erik Meijer videos Volta - Wrapping the Cloud with .NET - Part 1 and Volta - Wrapping the Cloud with .NET - Part 2. After viewing them, I walk away with the view that Volta requires understanding the realities and issues of object-oriented classes and methods, graphical user interfaces, Web servers, databases, etc… Anything but easy!

One thing Volta does do is make developing multi-tiered applications easier, mind you not easy, by having not to commit early on in the development on which tier a class or method resides.

…John