Parallel Programming Research Community Launches Web Portal

The PPRC (Parallel Programming Research Community), is pleased to announce the launch of its information-rich web portal, Parallel-programming.org . The portal tracks global parallel-programming research, from academia and industry, and provides complete coverage of parallel programming news, research papers, white papers, conferences, workshops, and blogs. Community participants can also sign up for the PPRC mailing list. To complement the web portal and mailing list, PPRC is planning a series of international workshops in Singapore, Karlsruhe Germany, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. "We are very excited about launching Parallel-programming.org for the parallel programming community," stated Mark K. Smith, PPRC executive director. "Solving the parallel programming hurdle for many cores is the industry’s grand challenge. By creating Parallel-programming.org, we can offer researchers and developers a centralized resource to learn about the latest work from academia and industry and provide a forum for collaboration." The motivation for PPRC is driven by the new reality of stagnant single processor-core performance, the need to efficiently utilize many parallel streams, and that the software environment for multi-core support is still in its infancy. While general agreement is that multi/many cores is the solution, there remain many critical unanswered questions. PPRC helps industry and academia to answer the tough questions:
  • How can you effectively utilize 1000+ cores?
  • Do we need new languages and paradigms?
  • Do we need more advanced parallelizing compilers?
  • While Parallelizing code is very complex and tricky, debugging and tuning parallelized code can be even more challenging. How many details should be exposed to the programmer?
  • Do we need new tools to help in this process?