Challenges and opportunities of obtaining performance from multi-core CPUs and many-core GPUs

Multi-core processors represent a major development in computing technology. For example, Intel^reg Coretrade 2 Quad processors, IBM Cell processors, and Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2, are widely used. However, most applications struggle to make the best use of the power provided by many-core processors. Easy-to-use software tools are hard to find. Furthermore, it´s not clear what changes need to be made to algorithms to fully utilize many-core CPUs or GPUs. In this paper, we try to offer a bird´s eye view of the opportunities lying ahead in two folds: (1) software tools and (2) workload analysis. With good software tools and insightful workload analysis, software and algorithm developers can not only harness the power of many computing cores, but also innovate new algorithms that best utilize the many computing cores. New algorithms and applications are thus made possible with the computing power not available before.