Machine Understanding as the future of Computing

Since the advent of computers, and later of the internet, the processing of massive amounts of data has been growing. Industry has been increasing computing power for decades, but the trend towards increasing speed of processing has reached the physical barrier. Vendors cannot put more processing power into a traditionally designed chip, without overheating it.

To solve the problem, vendors changed the architecture, building more processors into a single chip, calling them multicore chips. These new chips entered the mainstream market a few years ago, with all vendors currently selling them.

New multicore chips are also more power efficient, and the potential is basically unlimited for the number of cores that you can put on them. The potential processing power is absolutely unheard of, which will not only allow users to do thing faster, but also add more, and new, conditions to the current problems. Now it is possible to imagine applications that have not been possible before.

However, this new and exciting scenario comes with a challenge.

Since the inception of computers, software has been written with a single central processing unit (CPU) in a chip. To exploit the potential of multicore chips, software needs to be written thinking in parallel. Parallel programming is not a new concept, but it is more difficult to write. It is estimated than less than 10% of all the software programmers worldwide are able to deal with parallel programming.

In the next 10-15 years, there will be huge opportunities to either deal with all the legacy code written from decades of sequential programming, or to create new software that will take full advantage of thousands of cores in a chip, plus all the range of services, solutions and systems integration in between.

This is an ideal ground for the fertile mind of the technologists, software communities and researchers within New Zealand, Australia and our region. It is mainstream but it is a niche new technology. Open Parallel, a New Zealand based company specialising in Software for Multicore and Parallel Computing has been working in multicore for years. To increase awareness about multicore and to present the ecosystem that New Zealand and Australia already have in place to unveil the potential of multicore chips, Open Parallel is the organisation behind Multicore World – a global conference about Multicore Technologies (software and hardware).

Source