HP fires up Multi-Core Aid effort

HP has located a few friends, including Intel and AMD, to help it deal with the multi-core processor morass.

The hardware vendor has invited chums to join its new Multi-Core Optimization Program (MOP), which will support work that makes software run better across chips with numerous processor cores. HP's interest in this area proves obvious as it ships thousands of servers to customers dealing with today's dual- and quad-core chips. Such server customers have an edge over PC types since they've dealt with multi-threaded code for sometime, but everyone can use a helping hand.

Most importantly, HP will ship a multi-core application development tool suite by year end. This package will include fresh compilers, debuggers and math libraries for a variety of chip, server, operating system and networking products.

The likes of Intel, AMD, Accelrys and TotalView will supply complementary products and support as part of MOP. The vendors have agreed to concentrate their efforts on HPC (high performance computing) applications for the moment.

"HP is also adding technical support to help optimize independent software vendors' (ISVs) applications for multi-core performance," HP said. "Through its expertise and support, HP will help ISVs address the challenge of capitalizing on multi-core technology to meet customer demand for scalable application performance growth."

HPC apps can enjoy serious speedups through this kind of tuning, and such work done in conjunction with labs often trickles down to big business, benefiting server customers at large.

HP this week reasserted its HPC muscle, knocking out IBM as the dominant supercomputing vendor. HP-based systems accounted for 202 of the Top500 supercomputers, while IBM notched 192 systems. Dell placed a distant third with 23 systems. ®