Supporting the Hardware Revolution with Software Engineering

The computer industry continues to deliver enormous increases in computing speed and power at consistently lower costs. The average workstation that engineers use today is equivalent in power to the entry-level computer cluster of just a few years ago. Large-scale computing is now within the reach of more and more engineering teams, with the promise of new trends, like cloud computing, to make this access even more widespread.

However, today’s hardware paradigm has turned computational speed into a software development issue. For years, computer processors became faster with each new generation. Today, limited by thermal issues, individual processors are no longer getting faster. Rather, computing capacity is expanding through the addition of more processing units, or cores. The ability of software to scale effectively on a large number of computing cores is critical.