Thursday 17 March 2011

The Addictive Allure of Supercomputing

The European Medical Device Technology (EMDT) magazine interviewed me recently. InsideHPC also has pointed to the interview here.

The interview discusses false hopes of users: "Computers will always get faster – I just have to wait for the next processor and my application will run faster."

We still see this so often - managers, researchers, programmers even - all waiting for the silver bullet that will make multicore processors run their application faster with no extra effort from them. There is nothing now or coming soon that will do that excpet for a few special cases. Getting performance from multicore processors means evolving your code for parallel processing. Tools and parallelized library plugins can help - but in many cases they won't be a substitute for re-writing key parts of the code using multithreading or similar techniques.

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