Taken for Granted

A couple of interesting items from the Multicore Association front. First, they have organised a working group on Multicore Programming Practices, (MPP), to

“develop a multicore software programming guide for the industry that will aid in improving consistency and understanding of multicore programming issues.”

Even more interesting, for non-members, they are organising an informational meeting on the MPP initiative at the Design Automation Conference in Anaheim, on Tuesday June 10, from 1700 to 1830 (5-630 pm), room 201C in the convention centre. You should RSVP: see the Multicore Association website.

John Singer Sargent, Hercules and the Hydra (1922-1925)

On a related front, the end of May approaches and this should mean the appearance on the Multicore Association website of a publicly available version of MCAPI - their Multicore Communications API. Somewhat ironically, this was announced as being publicly available on April 1, but the news release just said it would “soon be publicly available” and the working group web page says it will be available by the end of May. Let’s hope so, as the public interest in MCAPI, and its possible takeup, will be a good indicator of whether the industry is beginning to converge on some standards here, as opposed to all the ad-hoc methods being used. The programming practices guide will hopefully give examples using MCAPI as well. Perhaps we’ll hear more about this in the June 10 meeting, which I also hope to attend. See you there!