Categories: Spotlight
      Date: Feb 10, 2009
     Title: GCN! Webinar on Multicore Challenges & Solutions, 26 February 2009, 3pm GMT
Making the Most of Multicore: Challenges and Solutions

This webinar will look at the state of the art in multicore architecture, and provide an overview of some of the software tools and techniques available for exploiting the power of these processors. It is of interest to both software engineers and managers: developers working with multi-core chips who want advice on achieving better software parallelism and performance; and managers to understand the most important considerations when procuring new hardware.

Register for this event here


Background & Agenda

Traditionally chip manufacturers have focussed on making their processors faster by using smaller and smaller transistors. But there is a limit to this approach which has been reached for silicon, so now the vendors are concentrating on having more processing cores per chip. Typically this has meant dual- or quad-core chips, but in the near future this will be expanded to 64-core and beyond. The challenges for exploiting this multi-core architecture are many and varied, but there is some hope: there are various programming paradigms for exploiting multiple processors simultaneously available, which are directly transferrable to programming for multi-core.

Chair: Ian Osborne

Speaker 1: Dr. Francis Wray, Partner, Concertant LLP.
Francis will provide an overview of the current and future developments in multicore technology, and some of the challenges to overcome.

Speaker 2: Dr David Henty, EPCC, The University of Edinburgh.
David will give an overview of the various software models which can be used to best exploit the processing power of a multicore architecture.