Parallel software plays catch-up with multicore
Rick Merritt
EE Times

06/08/2009 12:01 AM EST
URL: http://www.eetimessupplynetwork.com/217702195

Microprocessors are marching into a multicore future to keep delivering performance gains without frying in their own heat. But mainstream software has yet to find its path to using the new parallelism.

Proprietary programming approaches are gaining traction in a handful of applications. It could take a decade or more, however, for the brunt of the industry to catch up in any organized fashion, and the way forward goes through some tough terrain.

"Anything performance-critical will have to be rewritten," said Kunle Olukotun, director of the Pervasive Parallelism Lab at Stanford University, one of many research groups working on the problem seen as the toughest in computer science today.

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