“Multi-cores will change computing: need in future will be of parallel programmers”

Ahmedabad

“The emergence of multi-cores will change computing as never before. Software companies have to parallelize their applications or face extinction. While last decade saw a tremendous need of software programmers, the greatest need in the coming decade will be of parallel programmers”, Dr. Aviral Shrivastava, Associate Professor in the School of Computing Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering at the Arizona State University told in a workshop at Ahmedabad.

Under the guidence of Vice Chancellor, Dr. Akshai Aggarwal, Gujarat Technological University organized a workshop on “Beyond the hills of the Multicores, lies the valley of Accelerators” which was conducted by Dr. Shrivastava.

He said, “Computing has permeated our lives inside-out, e.g., implantable, cardiovascular defibrillators, or “emergency room in the chest,” inside our bodies, to cell phones, TVs, washing machines, etc., very close to us, and data warehouses, cloud computing etc., which we access remotely. This unprecedented integration of computing in our lives has been made possible because of two main reasons. i) We are able to design very power-efficient computers, and ii) very reliable computers.”

He started with the open discussion on what is the need of higher performance and asked why do we need more computing? We are already having high performance computers, but still we are running behind higher and higher computing.

He explained that “power efficiency is the bottleneck for high power computing and super computers. He discussed the heat dissipation mechanism and Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) of the processors starting from a small device like mobile to high end performing super computers.”

He said,“Multicores pave the road ahead” –Performance can be increased by adding more and more cores.”

He explained Accelerators can further improve power-efficiency of computation. He also talked about recent research in developing compiler technology.

Today, a typical desktop processor can perform 58 million operations per second in a Watt of power. However, there is a need to further improve the power-efficiency of computation to solve some of the most important scientific and engineering questions that we face today. Higher power-efficiency is needed not only for high performance computing, but also for embedded computing, where battery determines the weight, size, shape, recharge time, frequency, or essentially the usability of embedded system. Reliability is another glorious achievement of computing. Consider the fact that today’s computers are composed of about a billion transistors, each switching a billion times in a second. High levels of reliability that computers have found extensive use in safety and life critical applications, flight controllers, and pacemakers. Experts predict that in a decade or two soft error rate will be about once-per-day, he added.

– DeshGujarat