Where's The Software To Catch Up To Multicore Computing?

IBM's chief architect for next-generation systems software wonders how far we'll be able to push the software required to take advantage of supercomputer-class machines.
By Catherine Crawford
Information Weekly 

Jan 29, 2007 09:00 AM


In terms of available floating-point operations per second on processors and systems, Moore's Law hasn't yet reached its limits. But in terms of usable performance by most software--even advanced technical computing software--perhaps it already has.


A look at the Top500 Supercomputer Sites List (www.top500.org) shows that a large portion of the technical computing workload has moved to commodity Linux clusters: commodity servers, commodity networks and commodity storage. At the same time, novel multicore processor architectures, such as the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE), show the potential for substantial computing power (hundreds of gigaflops) to reside in entry-level servers, with, say, two to four processors....More

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