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Stanford Lab Tackles Parallel Computing
5/2/2008
"We believe in driving applications," says Hanrahan. "Among the most interesting are immersive, richly graphical, virtual worlds, both because of the unique experiences for users as well as the challenges in building such demanding parallel applications."
Stanford has already developed parallelism technologies, including Olukotun's collaboration with computer science and electrical engineering Assistant Professor Christos Kozyrakis to develop a more efficient way for processors to share memory, called "transactional memory." Dally has developed new ways for the flow, or "streaming," of software instructions from a compiler to parallel processors to work much more efficiently than in conventional supercomputers.
"We have a history here of trying to close this gap between parallel hardware and software," Olukotun says. "It's not enough just to put a bunch of cores on a chip. You also have to make the job of translating software to use that parallelism easier."
Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business. Send your higher education technology news to her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.
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