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Special Issue: Exploring the Frontiers of Computing Science and Technology: Adapting Emerging Multi‐ and Many‐core Processors
Author(s) -
Zhou Shujia,
Yesha Yelena,
Halem Milton
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.1488
Subject(s) - computer science , microprocessor , multi core processor , porting , supercomputer , ibm , computer architecture , parallel computing , graphics processing unit , cloud computing , many core , distributed computing , embedded system , operating system , software , materials science , nanotechnology
Recent trends in computer microprocessor development have shifted from a single powerful core to multiand many-cores. As a result, the continuous improvement in computing power fueled by the exponentially increasing speed of a single processor could be over. With applications such as Earth and space sciences, higher resolutions and more sophisticated treatments of physical processes make models even more computationally intensive. Moreover, the drastic increase of data collected by various instruments requires a significant increase in computing power for data processing and analysis. Therefore, it is crucial for the computational science and technology community to evaluate the impacts of this shift on computationally intensive modeling and data processing applications and to develop appropriate solutions. It is known that the computing power of conventional processors is limited by memory bandwidth. Adding more cores to the processors worsens the problem. It is necessary to adapt computing algorithms to effectively utilize the computing power of those conventional multiand many-core processors. In the last two years, there have emerged few unconventional processors: IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine (hereafter referred to as Cell) and NVIDIA’s Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Intel and AMD are also developing competing Cellor GPU-like processors, in addition to conventional multiand many-core processors. It has been demonstrated that certain computationally intensive applications with moderate data communication can benefit from both Cell and GPU with a significant performance improvement. However, these emerging processors require new programming paradigms, which increase the porting costs and impede their effective utilization. To address such issues with the unconventional multiandmany-core processors, this special issue assembles some of the latest research on assessing the impacts of multiand many-core processors, developing appropriate solutions, and taking advantage of the abundant computing power. The invited papers in this special issue represent augmented works originally presented at the Frontiers of Multicore Computing Conference 2008, held at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in August 2008. Of course, it is not possible for a single issue to include all the topics addressed by the conference. However, the selected papers cover representative research addressing the issues above. There are four and two papers addressing the issues related to Cell and multi-core processors, respectively. The paper by Germann et al. presents their approaches and optimization methods in