There were several information pieces that caught my attention over the last few weeks that seemed to be worthy of sharing. As one of the few non-technical people here at Acceleware, what I appreciated about all of these snipets was how clearly they affirmed the value of the technologies that we are working on. Two of these pieces have a connection with NVIDIA but the third is Intel, so that provides a good balance.

The first one occurred May 18th with IBM and NVIDIA announcing that Big Blue would start incorporating GPU technology in their iDataPlex Servers. It is another great endorsement for using GPUs as part of the processing engines in modern data centers. Check out the video with Scott Denham who gives a very concise overview of the multiple benefits of GPUs.

Next up is another NVIDIA generated piece from Bill Dally their Chief Scientist. Writing in Fortune magazine and to a broad based audience, Bill presents the logical case for why more compute power is required and that parallel computing is the only path for faster performance. It is a short but worthwhile read.

Final nugget is a webcast of a speech by Tim Mattson from Intel, delivered at the recent Oil & Gas High Performance workshop held at Rice University. Our CTO Ryan Schneider attended this conference and pointed me to the webcast. The talk is a bit more technical yet very entertaining as Tim comes out of Intel’s research arm and delivers the information as he sees fit (Intel PR people would cringe on some of his statements). Tim covers multi-core, heterogeneous computing; the need for programming standards and the reality that timelines for multi-core may be coming sooner than industries are ready for. He provides a slightly contrasting point of view that arrives to essentially the same conclusions about parallelism and multi-core programming.

Enjoy.