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AMD inks aid for HPC parallel code hounds

Deals in multiple multi-threaded apps

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AMD is making deals with a pair of multi-threaded code wranglers today in a move to help high performance computing applications shine on multi-core chips and graphics cards.

First is a pact with Rogue Wave Software, maker of products that let developers run their single-threaded apps concurrently on multiple cores without needing significant code tinkering.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but AMD said it would use Rogue's Hydra software suite to expand its parallel computing strategy. The companies appear to be targeting the financial services industry specifically with this one — although that may have something to do with announcing the agreement at a securities and financial markets conference in New York.

AMD said writing code for massively parallel processing can be difficult and time-consuming. And the company also laments that proprietary APIs mean that code written for one brand of processor can't easily be ported to another GPU or multi-core chip. So obviously AMD is hoping to swing some Nvidia and Intel HPC customers their way.

The chipmaker also got RapidMind's version of the multi-threaded application voo-doo to work with AMD FireStream 9170 CPUs and ATI Radeon HD 3870 GPUs.

RapidMind also makes software that lets developers code in a familiar single-threaded fashion, rather than learn complex multi-threaded software techniques.

The next version of RapidMind with support for the cards will be available in Q3 2008. ®

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Latest Comments

Re: Parallel code?

Sounds good to me to. Too good, in fact.

Fact is, parallelising a single algorithm is hard. Otherwise you wouldn't be so interested in having your tools do it. Writing an algorithm to parallelise is Hard, and you won't see the problem reduced to "tools and OS" until someone has solved the latter problem. It's been an active subject of compiler research for the last fifty years with frankly nothing much to show for the efforts. Don't hold your breath.

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Parallel code?

Both the BCS and the ITC are calling for a paradigm shift from thread based programming tofunctunal programming. This would put more oto the tools and OS amd give the programmer an easir time of working out all those concurrencies etc.. Sounds good to me!!

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