Conference to spark discussion on multiple-core computing

Organisers of the Multicore World conference, scheduled for March 27 - 28, in Wellington, say the conference will provide a platform for developers and investors in a highly topical and essential area of computer technology – the management of computing over multiple processor cores concurrently.

This technology is an important way of continuing to make computing “better, faster, cheaper and much more power efficient than in the single core days,” says Nicolás Erdödy for conference organiser Open Parallel. “It also allows us to think of applications and developments that were not possible before - the potential is practically unlimited.”

The main goal of the conference is to provide IT decision makers - CxOs and software community leaders - with the knowledge and the connections they need to make valid business and technology decisions in terms of their future multicore software and hardware requirements.

In the next 10 to 15 years, there will be huge opportunities to create new software that will take full advantage of thousands of cores in a chip and a range of services, solutions and systems integration in between, Erdödy says.

“This is an ideal ground for the fertile mind of the entrepreneurs, investors, technologists, software communities and businesses within New Zealand, Australia and our region.”

The line-up of speakers are already coming to the conference, includes six from the US travelling to New Zealand for that explicit purpose. James Reinders, director and chief software evangelist of Intel Corporation will be among the keynote speakers.

From the investment community comes Phil McCaw, Chairman of AANZ (Angel Association New Zealand) and managing partner of Movac – a NZ based “angel” and venture capital firm. McCaw will be leading a session about “investing in multicore.”

New Zealand researchers have already been responsible for significant work in the multicore space Open Parallel researchers and others have been doing to introduce parallel-processing commands to the PHP and Perl languages and thereby the WordPress blogging environment and other open-source products, using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks (TBB) library. This has attracted attention from Intel and Facebook, whose source-code transformer HipHop was used by the New Zealand developers. HipHop translates PHP into optimised C++, which it then executes in a particularly efficient way. Facebook open-sourced the HipHop code last year.