Special Issue: Exploring the Frontiers of Computing Science and Technology: Adapting Emerging Multi- and Many-core Processors

摘要

Recent trends in computer microprocessor development have shitted from a single powerful core to multi- and many-cores. As a result, the continuous improvement in computing power fueled by the exponentially increasing speed of a single processor could be over. With applications such as Earth and space sciences, higher resolutions and more sophisticated treatments of physical processes make models even more computationally intensive. Moreover, the drastic increase of data collected by various instruments requires a significant increase in computing power for data processing and analysis. Therefore, it is crucial for the computational science and technology community to evaluate the impacts of this shift on computationally intensive modeling and data processing applications and to develop appropriate solutions. It is known that the computing power of conventional processors is limited by memory bandwidth. Adding more cores to the processors worsens the problem. It is necessary to adapt computing algorithms to effectively utilize the computing power of those conventional multi- and many-core processors. In the last two years, there have emerged few unconventional processors: IBM's Cell Broadband Engine (hereafter referred to as Cell) and NVIDIA'S Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Intel and AMD are also developing competing Cell-or GPU-like processors, in addition to conventional multi- and many-core processors. It has been demonstrated that certain computationally intensive applications with moderate data communication can benefit from both Cell and GPU with a significant performance improvement. However, these emerging processors require new programming paradigms, which increase the porting costs and impede their effective utilization.