The Register has a pretty good report from the Supercomputing (SC) 2007 conference. Quite knowledgeable, and mostly about the thorny issue of programming massively parallel fairly homogeneous machines likes GPUs and floating-point accelerators. Of course, their commentary has to be commented on. Read on for more.
Monthly Archives: November 2007
The Register reporting from SC’07
Off-Topic: Car Sizes and Prizes
The car market is pretty fascinating in many ways. Going out actually buying a car quite recently, I was given cause to reflect on prize vs actual size. The non-linear prize increase you have to pay to get to a slightly bigger car from whatever point you are at is interesting. And the fact that a “very small” car is just above four meters long, while a “pretty large” car is at around five meters. How can a few centimeters actually matter that much?
Intel ARK
Intel has a really neat tool on their homepage: the Intel ARK — Automated Relational Knowledgebase. It is a horrible name for a brilliant tool: it lets you search for processor names, codenames, chipsets, and jump around in a database of processor variants, compatible chipsets, feature lists, and more. Not that I care particularly about Intel chips, but the tool is something everyone selling silicon devices should copy. Being able to quickly figure out just what is inside a certain device (and what is not), and finding related devices and compatible chips is just brilliant for curious people, customers, and supporting services.
Please, everybody else?
Øredev 2007
Just like in 2006, I went to the Øredev conference in Malmö and presented a workshop using Virtutech Simics. This year, I worked with Jonas Svennebring from Freescale and we created a workshop around parallelizing network processing software for running on a multicore Freescale processor. The workshop went reasonably well, and the participants definitely learned something about what we trying to get across, even though we did not have much time to actualy complete the programming assignments.
Off-topic: Open Command Prompt Here on Vista
I just found out that my favorite Windows XP PowerToy is built into Windows Vista. To get to a command-prompt located in any folder directly from the Explorer, follow the instructions found at a Microsoft MSDN blog: Tim Sneath : Windows Vista Secret #1: Open Command Prompt Here. Very useful. But why not make it more obvious than “press shift while right-clicking?”.