News

Professor Kunle Olukotun, director of Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory(PPL), introduced his talk at EPFL, August 2009, slides here, with "Now that we are firmly entrenched in the multicore architecture era, to take full advantage of these architectures, many application developers will have to develop parallel applications. However, today, parallel programming is so difficult that it is only practiced by a few elite programmers. Thus, a key research question is what set of hardware and software technologies will make parallel computation accessible to average programmers. I would like to outline the approach we are taking to answer this question in the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory." [...]

Scala has become an essential part of his strategy. A recognised pioneer in the field of multi-core chip design, he described today's bottlenecks and suggests how hardware architecture must be adapted, moving functions such as thread scheduling, Transaction Monitors and message passing from software to hardware. He identified how Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), built on Scala, can be used to capture the inherent parallelism in common fields of computation to more fully exploit the performance potential of future distributed, multi-threaded computer architectures.[more]

STANFORD ENGINEERING NEWSZINE -- Summer 2008
Even consumer-grade computers are beginning to ship with more and more processor "cores," meaning they are capable of handling many processing tasks and working on them simultaneously, or in "parallel." But writing software to take advantage of that capability is very hard. With the support of leading tech companies AMD, NVIDIA, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Intel, and Hewlett Packard, EE and CS Processor Kunle Olukotun launched the Pervasive Parallelism Lab in May. The lab will develop pramming languages and tools to make exploiting parallelism easier. [ pdf ]

MICHAEL COPELAND -- August 14, 2008
For decades the PC industry has juiced performance - and sales - with a regular two-step dance. [...] But the latest generation of chips, known as multicore, are so complex and so qualitatively different from their predecessors that they have flummoxed software developers. [...]

That's a dramatic change, and battalions of techies from Redmond, Wash., to San Jose are struggling to figure it out. "If I were the computer industry, I would be panicked, because it's not obvious what the solution is going to look like and whether we will get there in time for these new machines," says Kunle Olukotun, a computer science professor who is attacking the multicore challenge at Stanford's new Pervasive Parallelism Lab. "It's a crisis, and I wonder whether what we are doing and what is happening within the industry is too little, too late." [more]

NEWS RELEASE -- April 30, 2008
Stanford and many of the biggest companies in computing will announce Friday, May 2, a joint effort to address a major missed opportunity in information technology: the dearth of software that can harness the parallelism of the multiple processors that are being built into virtually every new computer. The Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL) pools the efforts of many leading Stanford computer scientists and electrical engineers with support from Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, NVIDIA, IBM, Hewlett Packard and Intel. [more]

JOHN MARKOFF -- April 30, 2008
In the computer world’s equivalent of “The Amazing Race,” three rival teams of computer researchers are working on new types of software needed to better use computer chips that can process many tasks at the same time.

Stanford University and six computer and chip makers plan to announce Friday the creation of the Pervasive Parallelism Lab. Besides Stanford, the backers are Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia, I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Intel. [more]

STEVEN MUSIL -- April 29, 2008
Clock speed is no longer the most important measure on processors prowess.

It has been supplanted by performance per watt, which addresses the greening of the chip industry. The performance bump that formerly came from cranking up clock speed is now the province of multicores. The only problem is that most software isn't good at taking advantage of multicore architectures.

To overcome that hurdle, Stanford University is partnering with Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel to create software that will allow chips to more efficiently process many tasks at the same time. [more]

ASHLEE VANCE -- April 30, 2008
Stanford University has mounted some gun turrets to its Ivory Towers. Just a few weeks after rival UC Berkeley revealed a mega-funding engagement with Microsoft and Intel around multi-threaded software, Stanford has returned fire by grabbing money from just about every other vendor on the planet with interest in improving code for multi-core chips for similar research.

In the coming days, Stanford will unveil the Pervasive Parallelism Lab on the back of $6m in funding over three years from Sun Microsystems, AMD, Nvidia, IBM, HP and even Intel. The lab will be headed by Kunle Olukotun, a Stanford professor, who made a major name for himself in the multi-core world by helping originate chips now sold by Sun as part of its Niagara or UltraSPARCTx family. The goal of the lab will be to make writing software for multi-core chips easier. [more]

CHRIS NUTTALL -- April 30, 2008
Intel and Cray have been talking this week about building supercomputers with a million cores or brains, but how will all those processors-within-processors work together and communicate with one another and how difficult will it be to write applications that take advantage of all of them?

This is the question that Stanford University hopes to answer with its Pervasive Parallelism Lab, announced on Wednesday. [more]

PETER BRIGHT -- May 1, 2008
Parallel computing is hard. Nothing new about that—it has been hard for the last four decades—but it used to be only the NSA and the occasional university who cared; parallel computers weren't cheap enough or common enough to bother regular people. In the last couple of years, though, that's begun to change—multicore processors are de rigueur, and are found even in the cheapest of PCs, not to mention consoles and video cards. In spite of this explosion in parallel computing availability, writing parallel programs that use the hardware effectively and provide good performance isn't significantly easier today than it was at the dawn of parallel processing 40 years ago. A new joint venture between Stanford University and major industry figures—Sun, AMD, NVIDIA, IBM, Intel, and HP—is going to attempt to redress this major deficit. [more]

SYLVIE BARAK -- April 30, 2008
Stanford University has joined forces with IBM, AMD, Sun Microsystems, Nvidia, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel to create innovative software that will let chips better process several simultaneously.

According to the New York Times, the partnership between the University and the six rival computer and chip makers will be formally announced this Friday, and the project will be dubbed the “Pervasive Parallelism Lab”. [more]

April 30, 2008
Nvidia Corp. said Wednesday it is a founding member of Stanford University's new Pervasive Parallelism Lab. [...]

The lab will develop new techniques, tools, and training materials "to allow software engineers to harness the parallelism of the multiple processors that are already available in virtually every new computer," Nvidia said. [more]

RICK MERRITT -- April 30, 2008
Six companies are contributing a total $6 million to kick off a three-year project at Stanford University to explore fresh models for parallel programming. The effort is one of three recently funded by a computer industry increasingly concerned software cannot keep pace with the evolution of multicore processors.

Advanced Micro Devices, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, NVidia and Sun Microsystems are funding Stanford's new Pervasive Parallelism Lab which will consist of about nine faculty and as many as 30 graduate students. Kunle Olukotun, a Stanford computer science professor seen as the father of Sun's multicore Niagara processor, will head the new lab. [more]

SCOTT FERGUSON -- April 30, 2008
Stanford University is planning to delve into the world of parallel computing.

On May 2, the university, along with some of world's largest IT companies, plans to unveil the Pervasive Parallelism Lab, which looks to develop new ways to create applications that can take advantage of the ever-increasing number of multicore processors coming into the marketplace.

The lab, which will have a $6 million budget during the next three years, will not only look for ways to develop new programming languages that make it easier to create applications that work with parallel computing—breaking down information into smaller parts to take advantage of multiple processing cores—but also to create the hardware to house these new multicore processors. [more]