I must have a weird disease. I lay awake at night vexed by this whole multi-core thing. While others celebrate the latest hardware revolution, I often find myself pensively staring at the bedroom ceiling. Moreover, as any reader of my columns knows, I have looked in a rational way at how multi-cores will affect the world of commodity clustering.
However, this month, rationality goes out the window. I am going to take a visit to my multi-core anxiety closet — those fearful thoughts that keep me tossing and turning at night in hopes of finding a happy ending. Gloom and doom aren’t optional.
To understand my fear, I should first explain my vision of cluster and parallel computing. My model is quite simple: a processor, local memory, and a communication link. To a programmer, this design, while tedious, can produce results and lends itself to optimization. Multi-core shatters this vision and presents some interesting challenges.
Recently Intel announced that by the end of the year they will be introducing a quad-core processor. AMD announced its dual core, dual socket, quad graphical processing unit (GPU) desktop using the trendy “4×4” moniker (four cores, plus four GPUs). My first cluster had four processors! Not only can you pack four cores on a single motherboard, the price is expected to be in line with what you would pay for a high end desktop. In other words, a new four-headed beastie isn’t four times the price of a single core. Cheap fast hardware. Why…
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