|
|
Dr. Marc Snir from the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign joined Clay and Aaron for episode #28 of Parallel Programming Talk News: Intel® Parallel Studio and is on schedule to go live in Mid 2009. Sanjiv Shah will be joining us on May 12 to Discuss Parallel Inspector. Learn more and download the beta today. Threading Challenge 2009 Intel Concurrency Checker 2.1 The free utility allows anyone to test multicore optimizations in an executable. Check out a demo Intel Concurrency Checker 2.1 demo video by Gaston Hillar. Download Intel® Concurrency Checker 2.1 and try it for your self. Send in your questions. The first Tuesday of every month we will pick a listener question and do our best to provide an answer. On the show: Professor Snir is Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has a courtesy appointment in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He currently pursues research in parallel computing. He is PI for the software of the petascale Blue Waters system and co-director of the Intel and Microsoft funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC). Dr. Snir discussed the UPCRC vision and the main drivers for the focus of the research. In the past parallel computing was only available to a small set of developers and the languages were more focused on the synchronization algorithms & preformance. Today most new computers are multi-core and can benefit from concurrent applications. Parallel programming now involves all the programming community but it is still more difficult than it should be because many of the tools are immature. The University of Illinois and the UPCRC is committed to the advancement of Parallel Programming and the education of developers. To support this goal the Center is hosting the UPCRC Illinois Summer School on Multicore Programming from June 22nd to the 26th (on campus and on line). The program offers experienced programmers, with little or no exposure to parallelism, an opportunity to learn about multicore programming. They are accepting applications up to May 15th. Space is limited. Register today! Additional Information about the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is available on line at: Parallel programming activities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign portal for the research community wokring on parallel programming. Up next on Parallel Programming Talk Listener Questions show on May 5th at 8:00AM (PST). Then Sanjiv Shah on May 12th at 8:00AM (PST). Don't forget to send in your questions. |
|
29/04/2009 12:53 PM
|
|
Whew, it has been a while since I wrote my last blog. New initiatives for the new year have been keeping me fully consumed. However, one of these new initiatives has reached a point where it was time to get it written up on my blog. The cost of Medicaid and Medicare has been written about often as government budgets are re-evaluated and the new administration takes root. With econonmic times being what they are the number of beneficiaries are increasing in an already overburdened system of service to US state and local communities. In response to concerns over rising costs, complex processes and fragile systems the Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) developed the MITA Framework. MITA stands for Medicaid Information Technology Architecture. It is an integrated business, data, application and technology architecture built on SOA principles and best practices. MITA is a strategy and a blueprint for establishing integrated business and IT transformations in State medicaid programs to tackle the issue of rising costs, complex business processes and fragile systems. A key challenge when implementing any kind of enterprise transformation and associated SOA project is how to crawl, walk and the run in the rollout of the implementation. The MITA framework proposes a multi-stage maturity model and many states are assessing how to progress through the stages of maturity. To help states progress from where they are to the necessary and desired states proposed by MITA, Intel, Oracle and Initiate have come together and assembled a webinar series on approaches to go from MITA theory and recommendations to specific implementations. This webinar series covers the essential elements of MITA relevant technology stack and how to apply common service oriented best practices with the right software foundation to achieve breakthroughs in key business processes like Fraud Prevention and Chronic Disease management. The webinars discuss in detail the business drivers, technical architectures, and deployment patterns on how to evolve State Medicaid and Medicare systems. I hope you get a chance to dig in to the webinars and see how SOA best practices and the right technology mix can make a big difference in US healthcare. You can register for the entire series on demand here. Until next time, Joe |
|
29/04/2009 12:41 PM
|
|
Today at MMS (Microsoft Management Summit) Brad Anderson showed a new use case we have been working on around Windows 7, SCCM SP2 & Intel vPro Technology. The specific use case is how to do an upgrade with user data while the state of the machine is powered down. This usage of vPro allows for OOB power up, then win7 installation begins. Here's what we will be posting shortly to help answer any questions you may have around this use case: * Video of MMS Brad showing this use case* Use case flow document that shows what technology is being leveragedWhat we have found in the lab, which I will publish out over the coming weeks, is that this technology works really well together and can make your win7 deployment easier. use cases. |
|
29/04/2009 07:03 AM
|
|
Hello everybody! I was reading the last Gael?s blog post about the community response and I think it?s a good time to share something different than AMT, parallelism and so on. Today I want to share my second life as a community guy; in my free time I use to participate in community events like presentations, training and so on. I started when I was in college in a Latin American academic initiative called ?Student Clubs?; I had a love hate relationship with this initiative but the truth is that it let a lot of people learned about the latest technologies without getting out their group of friends. Then I joined a non-profit organization called ?Ineta", there we organized and presented a lot of events focused on people and knowledge more than tools or products. I have always found that people tend to not feeling comfortable with this kind of event format so it?s a challenge to lead on them, but it feels great to participate in that kind of activities, you know there are few things money cannot buy and this feeling is one of them. I agree with Gael when she says one really does make the difference. After Ineta I took a break and then I joined this great community =). In my work We are also trying to build community, We are currently hosting a free event about Software Testing . And in my other free time (maybe I need a plutonian day) I?m presenting sessions on Windows Mobile native development. Ok, I hope I was not boring =) Bye! Javier Andrés Cáceres Alvis. |
|
29/04/2009 06:34 AM
|
|
For my first post here I thought best to start with some background and a bit of future gazing to help explain who I am (largely a data-orientated XML geek) and what interests me. My personal involvement with XML processing goes back just about 10 years now, it's been a great personal adventure, from utter confusion, to enlightenment and then overuse abuse before coming back to enabling the services revolution. There is no doubt I am biased here, but when I hear people characterize XML as just "angle brackets" (or compare JSON with XML for that matter), I know they missed the point. For me it's never been about the syntax but about the the joining of two parts of the data processing world so that we could at last seamlessly mix our human languages and those of our machines in an inclusive model that did not discriminate. The implementation of this ideal in XML is far from perfect, but it meets the good enough rule for the vision and that is I think about all we can ask for something so ambitious. So where to next? I mention services above because they represent phase 2 or what I think of as at least a 3 phase transition in how we think about data. If the merging of semi-structured and structured data with XML was the first phase, then the integration of application data silos via service & resource architectures with XML has to be the second phase and that feels like it is now also nearing completion at least in vision if not in implementation. My prediction for the third phase has to be the opening of that data to unexpected and ad-hoc use. While I so mean this in the sense of Web 2.0 mash-ups and social networking they are just the surface artifacts of something much bigger. I think we can all feel that, but as yet don't know fully what lurks below the water of this particular iceberg. If I was a betting man maybe I would put some money on the data portability project having the strongest vision here although it is rather too biased to the social and idealistic at times for my tastes. The software stack they promote is certainly something to note, OpenID, OAuth, RSS, OPML, microformats, RDF, apml, & XMPP, quite a collection if ever I saw one. |
|
29/04/2009 05:27 AM
|
|
The Operating System is a software layer that interfaces with the hardware or physical system to create an environment that allows a user to easily interact with the physical system. Over years, the operating system has grown in terms of complexity and grown to offer different services to support multiple hardware devices and applications. Platform virtualization takes the abstraction created by the operating system to the next level. This abstraction creates a virtual computing platform on which a general Operating System can installed, just as it were installed on a single physical machine. There can be multiple such computing platforms that can be hosted on a single physical machine. Platform virtualization allows easy provisioning of virtual computing platforms and also allows these platforms to be easily relocated from one physical machine to another. Software Appliances is a pre-packaged, self contained unit of a user application and its application dependencies and aimed to dramatically simplifying software deployment. Software appliances installed on a virtual computing platform would create a virtual appliance. JeOS is the abbreviation of Just Enough Operating system (pronounced as "juice") uses a different approach from the traditional one-size-fits-all Operating systems. It is a highly customized operating system that has been tuned to fit only a specific application. This allows the operating system to be very small and lightweight. Examples: Ubuntu Server JeOs, openSuse LimeJeOS, Oracle Enterprise Linux JeOS. JeOS contains only the basic bits of the operating system and is not useful as a standalone package. It only creates a base for various possible software appliances while keeping the major goal of a small distribution while giving the ability to install additional software. The combination of JeOS and software appliance for virtual environments, along with ability to easily quickly create virtual appliances, has enough potential from a cloud computing standpoint. There seems to be benefits by deployment of such appliances in a cloud but it would be interesting to determine the performance benefits On the flip side, the effort needed to remove or disable operating system interfaces, functions, libraries and unnecessary services while tailoring the rest to lightweight, high performance appliance requires expertise that are not easily available. |
|
29/04/2009 01:53 AM
|
|
My name is Soren Andersen. I work in Intel?s Information Technology Supply Network Capability group as a manager delivering strategic Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) programs and projects. My goal is to blog about the challenges of delivering ERP in a large corporation such as Intel. My intent is to focus on delivering ERP to enable the business. Since I am from Intel you might expect me to blog about Intel products. However, I will leave that to other company experts. In this entry I will provide you some background on who I am and also provide some context and a framework for upcoming entries. I have worked in the Information Technology/Information Systems field for over 20 years.After 11 plus years at Intel I have had the opportunity to work in a variety of roles in IT/IS environments.In terms of what you can expect from me with these blogs, here are some of the topics that I work with, come across, and interest me: |
|
28/04/2009 01:14 PM
|
|
Chip Chat Podcast - Introducing the Compute Geek's Version of the Muscle Car |
|
I?ve spent a lot of time talking about efficiency lately?but there?s nothing more fun than talking about pure performance. Performance is the hum of a well tuned engine as you downshift around a mountain curve, the wind in your face as you race down a hill on your bike, the thrill of a jet plane?s roar as it streaks across the sky. It?s also the smoking speed of a workstation when you?re used to a standard desktop PC?and that speed just got a lot faster with the introduction of our Xeon 5500 series workstation platforms. I recently talked to Thor Sewell and Wes Shimanek from our technical computing organization about what is shaping workstations and digital workbenches today, the key technologies driving workstation performance, and what users can expect from the compute geek?s version of the muscle car. Check out what they had to say here. |
|
28/04/2009 09:40 AM
|
|
In a recent post, Robert Chesebrough (Intel) talked about less focus on threads and more focus on tasks. I agree with him. I do believe that decomposing the job to be done into many tasks is the key to a successfully parallelized algorithm. Once you have the most important tasks, you can re-design the algorithm taking into account that you must exploit parallel architectures. Of course, you must understand how threads work and how modern multi-core microprocessors work. Then, you can use tools like a Gantt chart (yes, a Gantt chart) to find the critical sections (those areas where parallelization is extremely difficult or nearly impossible). This time, I?m going to show a simple example taking into one of the new features offered by future .Net 4.0 Parallel Extension. If you have an application that must perform many tasks and you discover that you have more than 2 cores available, it would be very convenient to launch them in parallel. However, which is the simplest way to launch many completely independent tasks in parallel? In C# 4.0, you?ll be able to use the new Parallel.Invoke method combined with lambda expressions: Parallel.Invoke( Taking into account the default options (you can even change many options taking into account your needs), if you run this code in a quad-core CPU with four logical cores, this is what will happen: ConvertMeshes(myMeshes) will run in Core #0. The current thread will be blocked until the four methods return from their execution in parallel. However, you could also run these four tasks concurrently and asynchronously. I?m trying to keep things simple. Is the code above easy to understand? Yes, it is very easy to understand it. It is easy to maintain. It is easy to optimize it. If you want to take full advantage of the future Parallel Extensions in .Net 4.0, it is highly recommended to learn about lambda expressions. They were introduced in C# 3.0 to shorten the code and to make it more functional. The aforementioned example is very simple. I tried to keep things simple, this was my idea in this post. However, please, do not forget to learn about threads. You?ll need that knowledge in the new parallel age. |
|
28/04/2009 05:50 AM
|
|
The Internet is abuzz on newly launched Intel Xeon processors, there are reviews showing manifold increase in server performance, which is for some type of applications the number is 150%. We have seen multiple records being shattered. Xeon 55XX series is doing the exact thing in the server world, what Core2duo did to the desktop space back in 2006. The beauty of new Xeon is that, its brings in something for everybody, Database applications, web servers, business logic servers, IT infrastructure applications, virtualization, HPC etc etc. While the IT administrators are busy reading reviews and calculating how much money they can save replacing thier aging infrastructure, I did like to give a small information about a less talked feature in the new Xeon called PCU. While the new Xeon got a brand new architecture, much discussed features are Integrated Memory Controller, Quick Path Interconnect, Turbo Mode (Any body remember the Turbo Switch on your computer cases back in old days, Turbo Mode gets you the Turbo speed without the need of the switch). But there is onething our architects added to Xeon architecture which is quite interesting but not talked much about is the Power Control Unit or PCU, I am going to provide a simple understanding of this feature without delving into complicated terminology of gates, Phase Locked Loops etc.While desktop users wont tend to bother much about power usage, things work differently in the server world. Data center architects and managers spend hundreds of hours crunching numbers on how to make their Data centers run cool without paying heft electricity bills. So having a power efficient processor under the hood of the server which can efficiently manage its power consumption means, saving money on power bills not only with actual power saving on the server but also the related cooling cost of the data center. Now that you know why it is a big deal to have a intelligent Microprocessor, lets see what is this thing PCU.PCU is an on-die micro controller introduced and dedicated to manage power consumption of the processor, this unit comes with it's own firmware andgathers data from temperature sensors, monitors current, voltage and takes inputs from operating systems and not to forget that it takes almost a Million transistors to put this this micro controller on-die, while a million sound like a drop in an ocean in a billion transistor processor, considering the older Intel 486 processor had the similar transistor count and ran windows 3.x quite well.In simple words the PCU controls voltage applied to the individual cores by using sophisticated algorithms, and hence sending the idle core to almost shut off level and reducing the power consumption. But let me explain this in more elaborated manner. In an older generation CPUs it wasn't possible to run each core on different voltages since they shared the same source and the idle cores still leaked power. But with the new generation Xeon, even though the four cores gets voltageWe can always say why there is a need for on-die power management when the same can be achieved by any operating system using ACPI power states, PCU accepts power state requests from operating systems but uses its own built in logic to doubly ensure that the OS request holds merit. There are instances where the operating system instructs the CPU to go to lower power state only to wake it up next moment, adding PCU get this process a fine grained efficiency and helps our customer data center run much cooler. |
|
27/04/2009 03:06 PM
|
Não confunda o Original com cópias. Aqui seu anúncio é tratado com seriedade.
Site 100% Compativel com o Google Chrome - Versão Oficial 1583 v0.2.149.27 ou superior, Firefox 1.5 ou Superior e Safari 3 ou Superior.
Downloads
