New-Tech Europe Magazine | June 2016

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Swarm, which should make parallel programs not only much more efficient but easier to write, too. In simulations, the researchers compared Swarm versions of six common algorithms with the best existing parallel versions, which had been individually engineered by seasoned software developers. The Swarm versions were between three and 18 times as fast, but they generally required only one-tenth as much code — or even less. And in one case, Swarm achieved a 75-fold speedup on a program that computer scientists had so far failed to parallelize. “Multicore systems are really hard to program,” says Daniel Sanchez, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who led the project. “You have to explicitly divide the work that you’re doing into tasks, and then you need to enforce some synchronization between tasks accessing shared data. What this architecture does, essentially, is to remove all sorts of explicit synchronization, to make parallel programming much easier. There’s an especially hard set of applications that have resisted parallelization for many, many years, and those are the kinds of applications we’ve focused on in this paper.” Many of those applications involve the exploration of what computer scientists call graphs. A graph consists of nodes, typically depicted as circles, and edges, typically depicted as line segments connecting the nodes. Frequently, the edges have associated

Added Powell, “Today, there are 8.2 billion Bluetooth products in use, and the enhancements in Bluetooth 5 and planned future Bluetooth technical advancements mean that Bluetooth will be in more than one- third of all installed IoT devices by 2020. The drive and innovation of Bluetooth will ensure our technology continues to be the IoT solution of choice for all developers. ” The addition of the Bluetooth SIG’s 30,000th member company shows that more and more companies are choosing Bluetooth as both the technology and the organization that will help them develop IoT products and services with the best consumer experiences and help bring those products and services to market faster and more successfully. Membership has grown over 11 percent since the end of 2015, now reaching a record-high with its 30,000th member, Blossom Group. The startup, which is building infrasound and low-frequency noise relaxation products, is just the latest validation that companies of all sizes and verticals are joining the SIG because the organization is working in collaboration with its members to advance the technology and make the world smarter, safer, better, and more enjoyable. “Implementing Bluetooth as our wireless technology and joining the SIG organization was the obvious choice to ensure our products’ success,” said Luke Sanger, CEO and co-founder of Blossom Group. “Bluetooth has the ubiquity of a trusted wireless communication platform and a great history of supporting market

trends and working with developers and members to produce ground- breaking products and applications. We know Bluetooth will stay ahead of the game by working with its members and embracing technological advancements – from power efficiency to IoT connectivity – to push the limits of innovation.”

Parallel programming

made easy New chip design makes parallel programs run many times faster and requires one-tenth the code. Larry Hardesty | MIT News Office Computer chips have stopped getting faster. For the past 10 years, chips’ performance improvements have come from the addition of processing units known as cores. In theory, a program on a 64-core machine would be 64 times as fast as it would be on a single-core machine. But it rarely works out that way. Most computer programs are sequential, and splitting them up so that chunks of them can run in parallel causes all kinds of complications. In the May/June issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ journal Micro, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present a new chip design they call

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