blogs, supercomputing, Hardware

Brainy Blog from Supercomputing Firm

Wade Roush 3/28/08

Proving that the blogosphere isn’t all about Paris Hilton or even Perez Hilton, Waltham, MA-based Interactive Supercomputing this week launched a new multi-author blog on high-performance computing called Parallel Lounge. With contributors including MIT computer scientist Alan Edelman and Cray Research veteran Steve Reinhardt, Interactive Supercomputing’s vice president of joint research, it’s the only Boston blog where you are likely to find such gems as:

Compare element-wise multiplication in a for-loop

for idx=1:n
y(idx) = 2*x(idx);
end

to a vectorized multiplication

y = 2*x;

In the for-loop, a command is sent from client to server in each iteration. This totals 1000 client-server calls, slowing down the code. Not only is the vectorized code simpler, but it requires only one client-server call.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com, call him at (617) 252-7323, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wroush.