Mike Ball » Tech

Architecture Goes Green

Mike — Sun, 25 May 2008 04:14:16 +0000

We are all packed (except for necessities) and I’m at loose ends for the next few days, so I’ve been catching up on TedTalks. I’ve mentioned a few of them here before.

Here’s one I especially like: Norman Foster: Building on the green agenda.

I have a few special reasons for liking it. First, it explains how architecture [...]

Some great work on music

Mike — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:50:29 +0000

I know I should have been keeping this up to date, and there really is lots to report on (we now own a house in Oregon), but I’ve just seen a talk and demonstration that really inspired me. Tod Machover at the MIT Media Lab has been experimenting with new ways to play music, and closes [...]

Many Cores are Coming

Mike — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 06:12:47 +0000

I went to an interesting talk today. Dave Patterson from Berkeley was talking about the near-term future and many-core chips. He’s talking about hundreds of cores on a chip, with perhaps a couple of heavy-duty processors to handle the serial parts of the code. They have an interesting wiki that pretty much [...]

Hummingbird Simulation using UPC

Mike — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 05:41:50 +0000

I showed a couple of slides from a PGAS conference below, but today I just got a real treat. It’s a dvd with videos of the conference plus some very interesting animations. This is an animation of a simulation of a hummingbird implemented using UPC (Unified Parallel C), a PGAS language. It’s an [...]

HPC Programming Models

Mike — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 05:37:22 +0000

Essentially all modern HPC code makes use of parallelism to speed up execution. Parallelism isn’t the only way to speed things up, but it’s the most general way, and the other approaches are usually used in massively parallel systems anyway. We’ll talk about these other approaches some other time.

There are two [...]

High Performance Computing

Mike — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:31:04 +0000

I’ve been working on the High Productivity Computer Systems (HPCS) project within Sun for the past two years. This is a project sponsored by DARPA to make super-computer systems more productive as well as faster and bigger. At the very least, it’s a noble effort and will increase our understanding of productivity. [...]