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Installing CUDA 4.0 on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

NVIDIA recently released CUDA 4.0, their latest toolkit to harness the compute power of modern GPUs. However, installing NVIDIA's CUDA 4.0 on Ubuntu 11.04 can give problems. This mini how-to describes the steps to make it work.

Tool support to “start sequential, finish parallel”

Intel recently made Cilk++ open source. Cilk++ allows you to write parallel programs but without having to deal with all the low-level details that an API like Pthreads forces on you. Cilk++ consists of language extensions and a smart runtime that balances the available work to keep the cores busy. Intel has merged the compiler code of Cilk++ into GCC 4.7 and the runtime is also available under a BSD license.

What I find interesting about Cilk++ is that it supports sequential semantics for your parallel programs. Since sequential programs are vastly easier to reason about than parallel ones, they are cheaper to develop and maintain. With Cilk++ you can build a parallel application while paying for a sequential one. Not bad, right?

The threat of threads – how do you avoid threading bugs?

Increasing the performance of an application can often only be established by splitting up code into multiple threads, the only way to exploit the computational horsepower of a multi-core processor. However, the introduction of threads may cause a race condition. Threads are often not executed in the same order as they are created, and may execute at different speeds as they race to completion. If not properly accounted for, this results in unexpected and incorrect program behavior.

NMI panel session: Programming multicore systems - is the model broken?

On April 5th, I participated in a panel discussion titled “Programming multicore systems – is the model broken?”. The panel discussion was part of a Multicore Processors event organized by the NMI, taking place at ARM’s facilities in Cambridge. Preceding the panel discussions were a number of presentations including one from Mike Muller, ARM’s CTO. Other presentations were from Intel, Synopsys, Picochip, the University of Manchester, Freescale and Windriver. These NMI events are excellent opportunities to determine how specific developments are affecting the industry and how they are being perceived by the different players in the industry. In addition these events offer lots of opportunities for networking.

Multicore going mainstream

Having attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and shortly after the Embedded World congress in Nuremberg, it's clear to me that multicore is happening, and it's happening fast. At the Mobile World Congress, nVidia showed off their Denver mobile processor with a quad core inside. Qualcomm announced their new Krait architecture, which includes up to four cores. Intel's Sandy Bridge started shipping in January, with four x86 cores on board. Haswell, Intel’s next architecture revision, defaults to eight cores. This weekend, a friend of mine showed me his new phone, the LG Optimus 2X. The 2X stands for dual core; multicore is even becoming a topic the marketeers touch.