Reviews

On Dec 6 Ricardo Banffy wrote: I've seen the future, and it's parallel
High performance computing is a vast field, and it makes sense when you have enormously diverse space filled with vastly different solutions - clusters of similar processors, dedicated in-processor vector hardware (such as Intel's AVX) or stand-alone GPGPUs, shared memory, message passing and so on. Writing efficient code for such machines is difficult and writing code that runs well on all kinds is, I dare do say, next to impossible. The Xeon Phi presents a relatively simple model of homogeneous x86 processors with local vector facilities sharing a pool of memory. This books offers a good intro to HPC and goes into some depths that will help your code perform better on massively multi-core machines. There was one nagging feeling that kept with me throughout this book. While it's geared towards current HPC problems, several architectural peculiarities of the Xeon Phi also hint towards the only credible future for CPUs. When even phones expose 4-core architectures to their programmers, learning to live with a large collection of relatively low performance cores is a must. While we won't see a Phi-based desktop anytime soon, 4 and 8 core architectures will eventually work their way into low-end machines everybody has. Ignore it at your own peril. Full Review  >

Rating: 4.0