ACM TechNews

Intel, Microsoft Describe Parallel Progress

EE Times (08/22/08) Merritt, Rick

Intel and Microsoft recently discussed their efforts to create a new parallel programming model for future multicore processors in separate presentations at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Microsoft discussed its vision for adding new layers to its system software stack and the point extensions it is adding to its .Net environment. Intel talked about new planned extensions to the x86 instruction set and revealed progress on Ct, extensions to the C++ language intended to support greater parallelism. Microsoft Parallel Computing Initiative leader David Callahan says the company hopes to use the parallel shift to enable advances in computer interfaces. Callahan says the software used in tomorrow's systems will be much more layered into separate elements, including new runtime environments that sit in a user space below application libraries and above hypervisors and the core operating system kernel. The runtime environments will act as schedules and work cooperatively with hypervisors that map virtual-to-physical resources and operating systems that manage access to the physical hardware. The goal is to be better at handling the growing number of competing requests in multicore environments. Microsoft will make its runtime layer available to third parties, because it believes there will be a need for many kinds of interoperable software abstractions from different vendors to serve different application types. "There are a deep set of changes before you can even get to rebuilding libraries and rewriting apps," Callahan says.

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