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The news in this category has been selected by us because we thought it would be interestingto hard core cluster geeks. Of course, you don't have to be a cluster geek to read the news stories.
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The industry leading PathScale Compiler has found a new home at SiCortex. For those of you who don't know, SiCortex has engineered a Linux supercomputing cluster from the silicon up -- interesting technology. PathScaleâs compiler team, along with certain intellectual property and business agreements, will join SiCortex. Fred Chow, who heads up the PathScale team at QLogic, will join SiCortex as director of compiler engineering.
The past acquisition of PathScale by QLogic left some questions as to the future of the PathScale compiler as QLogic was clearly interested in the InfiniPath adapter. While the SiCortex machine is based on the MIPS64 architecture (as was the original PathScale compiler) and uses the MIPS64 PathScale compiler, the X86_64 support will continue. You can relax, the PathScale Compiler has found a good home in the HPC world. The full press release (pdf) is here.
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For those still scratching their heads and thinking about how to program multi-core processors, Intel released their Threading Building Blocks (TBB) under the GPLv2 License with the runtime exception. So what is TBB? From the website:
Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB) offers a rich and complete approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program. It is a library that helps you leverage multi-core processor performance without having to be a threading expert. Threading Building Blocks is not just a threads-replacement library. It represents a higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability.
Rumor has it that the open TBB has been built and run successfully on non-Intel processors as well. There is even an O'Reilly Book written by James Reinders, director of business development and chief evangelist for Intel's Software Development Products. Have at it.
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Intel has just released a program called Intel Cluster Ready. The initiative is an attempt to create a standard platform for ISVs to deliver software on clusters. It includes a piece of software called Cluster Checker that once run can certify the cluster environment (so that ISVs have a predictable software environment).
While this is a laudable goal, I wonder if it too Intel centric? A brief perusal of the specification seems to include and "Intel Wall" (Intel Compiler and MPI) that is required to meet the specification. I have not had time to read all the documents fully or try the software, so perhaps it is a bit more flexible.
Of course, it is not unreasonable to expect the specification to be Intel centric, but clusters, like open source, are about choice. Would an "Open Cluster" effort be more valuable to the community? What do you think?
