channel programs

I'm in a whirlwind tour for my company presenting at various channel events. Some are internal, so you won't hear about them. However, I've also been in the public on a couple of panels about where Cloud & Collaboration are going.

My big headline is the IT shops have yet to internalize the new expectations of their customers. If they can get the same service from Amazon EC2 in less than 30 minutes, then why can't they get it from IT.

Next stop: Linux on Wall Street. New York City, Roosevelt Hotel at 1:15pm

I've settled in at my new position. I'm back on the road at different conferences and symposia.

My focus has changed from hardware enablement of high performance to a much broader of approach of B2B marketing. I spend less time on market making, which I miss, and more time on raw creativity, which I enjoy. It is still technology and it is once again with a company attempting to change the dominant paradigm. I can't get away from those key themes.

Updates here will more regular than they have been... I have the following to blog about:

• IDC Directions Boston: What happens to IDC when it is marketers who are spending the money, not product managers.
• Everything Channel's LA Xchange: An event for VARs. The most interesting part was a discussion of "the next big thing" in value add.
  

I'm looking to attend IDC's HPC User Forum. It has been a while since I attended one and it could be fun. I just need to get it through my corporate beauracracy.

As always, these posts are mine. Though they benefit directly from my work, everything here is public information and personal observations only.

I'm still in the marking time stage - at a new job with a much broader focus than the newest technology. As one might imagine, I'm already heading toward a way to use the cutting edge to help put out the messages for which I get paid.

meanwhile, I track the mutli-core, multi-silicon progress as best I can. The news is everywhere. We really want to have more compute at less power. The race is on between general purpose CPUs whose power is less than 10W per core and specialized silicon, whose wattage is creeping up.

Have Intel & AMD figured out that the market really doesn't need to go faster, just more throughput? Or are the specialized silicon vendors just overreaching in their bid to loo and feel more like general purpose CPUs?

marking time

Note to self...
I started this blog because I have been working on the cutting edge of faster computing. Thanks to my position, resources and connections I regularly attended events with many people smarter and more expert in the field of computing than I am. Others in this field could and have benefited from my exposure. Clearly, this hasn't been happening lately.

Accelerating Security...

Courtesy of Amir at Reconfigurable Computing...

Co-CPUS, and FPGAs in particular, are excellent crypto crackers. When I started thinking about using a co-processor as a security solution, I never thought of these applications. Crypto cracking is one of the few examples I know where the co_CPU is overwhlemingly faster than the x86 core. It helps that crypto cracking is really *just* an algorithm, while most of us use more complex applications.

It's worth reading Amir's summary and especially the video from Shmoo.


PS: I was off the conference circuit for a while. For those of you who know my personal life, it was an excellent extended summer vacation...

HPCSW: The Presentations

I've been on hiatus from conferences for several months. So, my first order of business is to clean up old posts and comments.

1. HPCSW Presentations are on line. There is a lot of discussion about how hard it is to program more cores. I still can't get the statement that several people made there, which was "I really want flat coherent memory." In another post, I need to highlight some of those requests and responses.

http://www.hpcsw.org/presentations/index.shtml

2. RSSI is this week... I'm not there, but another of our intrepid correspondents will be.
http://rssi.ncsa.uiuc.edu/

Spring Announcement Season

I don't have much editorial to add here... The move to commercialize Accelerated Computing is on. To sell to a commercial, not research, customer requires solutions - defined as software and hardware working together on an application. Below are the links to three recently announced solutions...

1. Mitronics with not-so-new news, pushing the Bio stack they showcased just about one year ago at ISC. The demoed it (again) at BioIT World April 28th . They are also promoting the new personal SDK. I don't have experience with it, but would love to hear a story or two.... For the Bio demo news go here. For more on the SDK go to their home page, http://www.mitrionics.com/.
2. Acceleware does EDA for the Koreans. In an example of working really hard at it, Acceleware has partnered with SPEAG, a specialized simulator for EM (Electromagnetic readiation), to sell an GPGU version of their SW as a turnkey solution. Korean handset radiation simulation is not the only use. Boston Scientific also uses the solution. They claim 25x speed up.
   
3. Angstrom, a Boston area system builder, has announced formal support GPGPU with both a hardware platform and an accelerated GPGPU library. The library is a plug in for Atlas, a well known linear math library. So this isn't really a solution, but it's a step in the right direction.
   

Speaking of BioIT World... Joe Landman was there. His post from the floor is here. It doesn't cover Accelerated Computing, but he deserves the plug.