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I just returned from the 14th SIAM conference on parallel computing in Seattle. I was presenting a SIMD matrix compression algorithm Ive been working on for some applications in quantum chemistry. There were a lot of interesting technical talks but my favorite was a non-technical plenary talk by Horst Simon on energy-efficient computing, [...]

Two thoughts, in particular, stand out. In any sufficiently large field of study:
(a) there is no single person who is an authority, and
(b) at any given moment, there will be many people working independently on the same problem. To anyone who has done any type of research, these are self-evident truths. [...]

SIAM is holding a conference on parallel computing in Seattle next February. I’m pretty psyched about it mostly because I’ve been sinking a lot of time into GPU-based stream computing lately and from a cursory look at the program I’d say that GPGPU is going to be the subject of a lot of interest. [...]

I spend a fair amount of time programming GPU’s. when I tell certain people this they ask ‘why bother?’.   Well here is a partial answer in the form of an amusing chart I came across while preparing slides for a talk at HRL:
The gist is that you cant wring many more cycles per second [...]