Microsoft launches effort to exploit multicore processors

In yesterday’s New York Times, John Markoff wrote (Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust) about a major new effort Microsoft is making to develop their capability to exploit the new multicore processors being developed by Intel, AMD and IBM.

When he was chief executive of Intel in the 1990s, Andrew S. Grove would often talk about the “software spiral” — the interplay between ever-faster microprocessor chips and software that required ever more computing power.

The potential speed of chips is still climbing, but now the software they run is having trouble keeping up. Newer chips with multiple processors require dauntingly complex software that breaks up computing chores into chunks that can be processed at the same time.

The challenges have not dented the enthusiasm for the potential of the new parallel chips at Microsoft, where executives are betting that the arrival of manycore chips — processors with more than eight cores, possible as soon as 2010 — will transform the world of personal computing.

The company is mounting a major effort to improve the parallel computing capabilities in its software.

“Microsoft is doing the right thing in trying to develop parallel software,” said Andrew Singer, a veteran software designer who is the co-founder of Rapport Inc., a parallel computing company based in Redwood City, Calif. “They could be roadkill if somebody else figures out how to do this first.”

Games and interactive entertainment are among the first application areas to benefit from multicore processors, primarily through the Sony PS3 console.

The UMBC Games, Animation and Interactive Media programs includes the study of parallel and multicore computing as one of the key technologies in the Computer Science track and in partnership with UMBC’s new Multicore Computing Center. This coming Spring, for example, UMBC is offering a special topics course (CMSC 491s/691s) on the topic — Introduction to Cell Processors and Applications.

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Epic’s Tim Sweeney on “Programming for future CPUs and GPUs”

Tim Sweeney, the CEO and Chief Architect of Epic Games, will give a distinguished lecture at 10:30am this Friday 2 November on “Programming for future CPUs and GPUs” at Johns Hopkins in room 3 of Shaffer Hall. The talk is open to the public.

Sweeney is doing R&D work on game, graphics, and programming language technology aimed at the large-scale multicore CPUs that will be prevalent in the next decade. In his lecture, Sweeney will be sharing his thoughts on the major changes coming in programming practices and computing architectures in that time frame.

Tim Sweeney founded Epic Games in 1991 and wrote a number of early shareware games. In 1995, he began developing the Unreal Engine, which has since grown into the game industry’s leading technology. Now on its third generation, the Unreal Engine is used in over 150 leading-edge games for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3; Epic’s current games include Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3.

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UMBC Multicore Computing Center

With support and collaboration from IBM, UMBC has established the UMBC Multicore Computing Center (MC2) to investigate applications of new parallel processing technologies, including the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. We will integrate 12 IBM BladeCenter QS20s, each with dual 3.2-GHz CBEs into our existing Bluegrit supercomputing cluster, which includes a a 116 core PowerPC cluster. The new processors will be connected by Gigabit Ethernet and 20-Gbit/second Infiniband links.

So, what does this have to do with games? A lot.

The CBE was jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba and first used in Sony’s PS3. Game consoles can take advantage of high-performance computing to support their graphics and the CBE is what makes the PS3 special. But looking beyond speeding up 3D graphics, there are many more demands that games will make on processors — managing large artificial worlds, making computer controlled game characters more intelligent, adding speech and language processing, etc.

The UMBC MC2 will provide our game programs with a unique asset — a chance for students in the computer science track to learn about multicore and cell processors and, importantly, how to write programs to take advantage of them. Software engineers with experience with these new processor technologies are in high demand in the game industry as well as for any applications that have high computational demands.

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Multi-core and cell processors for games

The game industry has a strong need for software engineers that know how to take advantage of the new multi-core and cell processors. An article in CNET (Game developers adapt to multi-core world, explains it this way:

PC game developers appear to finally be getting the message: the free ride is over.

For years, developers were able to take advantage of faster and faster processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. All they had to do was write their program once, and it would run faster and faster as Intel and AMD cranked up the clock speed.

But overheating forced chip companies to adopt designs with two or more processor cores running at slower speeds, which meant that some applications written to run on a single thread couldn’t take advantage of that extra horsepower. This has required an entirely new way of looking at software development, prompting Intel this week to release another batch of software development tools aimed at helping developers make that transition.uote>

The CSEE department will offer its course on Parallel and Distributed Processing next in the Spring of 2008. In the mean time, if you are interested in exploring how to use these new architectures, you might check out Intel’s Multi-Core webinar series.

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