Today is shaping up to be an excellent day for a number of reasons:

We have an excellent new contributor, Tarek Chammah. Tarek is a graduate student at the University of Waterloo who specializes in software approaches to parallelization, including run-times, languages, APIs, etc.

I recently had the opportunity to go to lunch with Tarek and we had an excellent time and I learned quite a lot about the trends on the software side of the equation. One of the points that Tarek emphatically made is that with the emergence of parallel processing, the software is becoming equally important as the hardware. Times are a changing, and it's not just about your good old compiler getting code into shape for the hardware; software is truly an essential part of the glue that binds together the system, and I hope to be able to discuss software more in the future at RWT.

Second, Tarek has provided us with an excellent article covering some of the highlights of the HotPar 2010 workshop. Hot Par was held in Berkeley this year, and included a fair number of papers - but almost all of them were software focused. This is a nice change of pace from our usual coverage of ISSCC, Hot Chips or IEDM:

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT072610001641

Please join me in thanking Tarek for his contribution, and I look forward to some lively discussions.


David