Dan Reed: On Many-Core Futures and Parallelism in the Cloud

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Dan Reed is Microsoft's Director of Scalable/Multi-Core Systems Research and head of the recently formed Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC): one at the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) and a second at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Since we focus a great deal on the Cocurrency and Parallelism Revolution here on C9 we figured Dan would be another great technical guru to talk about Multi/Many-Core's impact of the future of general purpose computing. The angle of this conversation focuses attention on the server-side parallelism story which is distinct from the client problem (as addressed deeply and eloquently by Burton Smith here).

 

Certainly the Cloud, as it were, must be scalable and highly performant in the parallel age of Many-Core. What are some of the challenges on the server side with respect to concurrent processing? Clustered server environments have traditionally been very good at parallel computation (compared to the general purpose client) so what's Dan and Microsoft working on to ensure our Cloud scales to Many-Core?

 

Dan has a very interesting biography:

 

 

"Previously, I was the founding director of the Renaissiance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina, the Chancellor's Eminent Professor, and Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation. Before that, I was head of the Department of Computer Science, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor, and Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.

I am also a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA)"

 

Dan was the Director of NCSA during the birth of browser Mosaic which changed the way people interact with the Internet forever... We talk about where the web is today (including browsers) versus what Mosaic enabled when it arrived.

 

Enjoy. This is another great discussion with a supercomputing stalwart whose main focus these days in ensuring we are prepared for the highly parallel future of general purpose computation in the sky.

 

Low res file here.

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