In previous posts on this blog, Berkeley’s David Patterson, Intel’s Andrew Chien, and Microsoft’s Dan Reed presented their views on why research advances are needed to overcome the problems posed by multicore processors. In this piece — the fourth (and possibly final) entry in the series -– Marc Snir from UIUC argues that there are major challenges facing us but yet, the sky is not falling. — The CCC blog has published a couple of articles on the multi-core challenge, all emphasizing the difficulty of making parallel programming prevalent and, hence, the difficulty of leveraging multi-core systems in mass markets. The challenge is, indeed, significant and requires important investments in […]

The problem of parallel computing is occupying the minds of a growing number of researchers. Why is this age-old concept so “hot” today? In this article — the second in a series of opinion pieces –Andrew Chien, Vice President and Corporate Technology Group Director for Intel Research, gives us his perspective on the issue, with a particular focus on the challenges facing us in education and funding.

Researchers working in areas spanning computer architecture, programming languages, operating systems, algorithms, and more have been thinking harder about the problem of parallel computing. Why has the age-old concept of parallelism become so “hot” today? To provide the first of an upcoming series of opinion pieces, we asked David Patterson, Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, to give us his thoughts, and the rationale for increased government funding to solve the multicore challenge.