The World is Going Parallel, New Zealand has a Leading Role

New Zealand. February 2, 2012

The World is Going Parallel and New Zealand has a Leading Role in it
James Reinders, Director and Chief Software Evangelist of Intel Corporation will be one of the keynote speakers at Multicore World 2012, the inaugural conference about multicore technologies in Australasia.
Organised by Open Parallel – a NZ high tech company at the leading edge of Parallel Computing, with the opening address of Her Worship the Mayor of Wellington, Celia Wade-Brown, Multicore World 2012 will present the latest of multicore technologies and show NZ potential to be at the forefront of the Multicore Revolution

In the last week of March 2012, New Zealand will pioneer the world by launching an ecosystem of software communities, industry, academia and investors, to be at the forefront of the software development for the Multicore Revolution.
Multicore World 2012 starts on Tuesday 27 of March, gathering under the same roof, entrepreneurs, investors, academics, researchers, engineers, software developers and members of industry giants like Intel, Oracle and Cisco to present what Multicore can do for your organisation TODAY.
Organised by Open Parallel, Multicore World has a unique line-up of world-class guest speakers, six of them coming exclusively from the United States for the conference.

The main goal of the conference is to provide IT decision makers being C-level executives as well as software community leaders with the knowledge and the connections they need to make valid business and technology decisions in terms of their multicore software and hardware requirements over the coming years.

What is Multicore?
Since the advent of computers, and later of the internet, the processing of massive amounts of data has been growing. Industry has been increasing computing power for decades, but the trend towards increasing speed of processing has reached the physical barrier. Vendors cannot put more processing power into a chip, without overheating it. To solve the problem, vendors changed the architecture, building more processors into a single chip, calling them multicore chips. These new chips entered the mainstream market a few years ago, with all vendors currently selling them.

New multicore chips are also more power efficient, and the potential is basically unlimited for the number of cores that you can put on them. The potential processing power is absolutely unheard of, which will not only allow users to do thing faster, but also add more, and new, conditions to the current problems. Now it is possible to imagine applications that have not been possible before.

However, this new and exciting scenario comes with a challenge. Since the inception of computers, software has been written with a single central processing unit (CPU) in a chip. To exploit the potential of multicore chips, software needs to be written thinking in parallel. Parallel programming is not a new concept, but it is more difficult to write. It is estimated than less than 10% of all the software programmers worldwide are able to deal with parallel programming. In the next 10-15 years, there will be huge opportunities to either deal with all the legacy code written from decades of sequential programming, or to create new software that will take full advantage of thousands of cores in a chip, plus all the range of services, solutions and systems integration in between.

Why New Zealand?
This is an ideal ground for the fertile mind of the technologists, software communities and researchers within NZ. It is mainstream but it is a niche new technology. It is already taken advantage of the skills available in NZ: Open Parallel's Web Optimisation division has been working with Intel since early 2010. In September 2011, Open Parallel released the threading of PHP and Perl, two of the most widely used languages for web development.
Parallel computing is already essential to process the vast quantities of data produced by the Internet of Things, or to deal with the Big Data originated by Social Networks and its exponential growth, as well as the information that will be produced by the SKA telescope, a global scientific project that NZ is a key part of it.

To increase awareness about multicore and parallel programming and to present the ecosystem that NZ already has in place to unveil the potential of multicore chips, Open Parallel organises Multicore World 2012 – an international conference about Multicore Technology (software and hardware) as part of its vision to establish New Zealand as a centre of excellence for multicore and parallel computing. Multicore World will be held 27 – 28 March 2012 at the Wellington Town Hall.

ENDS

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