Multicore Challenges and Benefits for High Performance Scientific Computing

Journal Article · Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2008 · Scientific Programming

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1155/2008/450818· OSTI ID:1197988

Nielsen, Ida M. B. ^[1]; Janssen, Curtis L. ^[1]

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1. Sandia National Laboratories, P.O. Box 969, Livermore, CA 94551, USA

Until recently, performance gains in processors were achieved largely by improvements in clock speeds and instruction level parallelism. Thus, applications could obtain performance increases with relatively minor changes by upgrading to the latest generation of computing hardware. Currently, however, processor performance improvements are realized by using multicore technology and hardware support for multiple threads within each core, and taking full advantage of this technology to improve the performance of applications requires exposure of extreme levels of software parallelism. We will here discuss the architecture of parallel computers constructed from many multicore chips as well as techniques for managing the complexity of programming such computers, including the hybrid message-passing/multi-threading programming model. We will illustrate these ideas with a hybrid distributed memory matrix multiply and a quantum chemistry algorithm for energy computation using Møller–Plesset perturbation theory.

• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• Grant/Contract Number: DEAC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1197988
• Journal Information: Scientific Programming, Journal Name: Scientific Programming Vol. 16 Journal Issue: 4; ISSN 1058-9244
• Publisher: Hindawi Publishing Corporation
• Country of Publication: Egypt
• Language: English