IT community encouraged to attend Multicore World 2013

www.MulticoreWorld.com

Open letter to IT community encourages Multicore World 2013 attendance

GreenButton’s founder says New Zealand’s IT community should wake up to the opportunity of having a world-class conference on their doorstep in Wellington next February.

Scott Houston, who is also GB’s chief executive travels the world in promoting the company’s cloud computing applications, and has attended the odd conference or two.

“The calibre of people speaking at Multicore World 2013 is second to none,” says Houston.

“This conference is about multicore computing, optimising code for this new world, cloud architecture and much more. For such a fundamental topic and underpinning of today and tomorrow’s computing infrastructure, New Zealand IT people don’t have to travel far – the experts are coming to us.”

This “local proximity” is one of the reasons GreenButton is sponsoring the event says Houston, and a reason to also pen an open letter to professionals and interested spectators in computing developments inviting them to attend.

Multicore World 2013 is taking place at the Wellington Town Hall on February 19 & 20, and boasts an international line up of speakers who are authorities on computer architecture which allows parallel processing and massively increased computer, smartphone and other device performance.

Among the speakers are IBM’s Paul McKenney, Intel’s Tim Mattson , Prof Ian Foster of Argonne National Laboratory and FreeBSD’s Poul-Henning Kamp.

Discounted GreenButton, Catalyst IT and Scoop.co.nz sponsored registration tickets to the Multicore World 2013 are available until January 14 for $750. The full registration fee is $950.

Houston says that he is finding an increasingly strong interest among GreenButton’s associates such as Microsoft, Dell and Pixar in coming to the Multicore event.

“We can become a destination for this conference,” he says.

“It is a great time of year from a northern hemisphere point of view, and the calibre of people speaking would fill seats anywhere in the world.

“I can’t speak highly enough about the value to New Zealand of having this event in Wellington. We really owe it to ourselves to get behind this inspirational conference.”

ENDS

Contacts
Nicolas Erdody, Director Open Parallel. Nicolas.erdody@openparallel.com (027 521 4020)
Karen Bender, Business Growth Manager, Grow Wellington. Karen.bender@growwellington.co.nz (021 628 144)

What Is GreenButton™

GreenButton™ was ranked the Asia Pacific’s 32nd fastest growing technology company in 2012 by the Deloitte Asia Pacific Technology Fast 500, and an award winning global software company that specializes in high performance cloud computing.

What is multicore?

The ability of computers to process massive amounts of data has been growing ever since they were invented. As computer power has increased, the speed of processing has reached a physical barrier, and more processing power cannot be put onto a chip without overheating.

The problem has been solved by putting more processors onto a single chip, creating multicore chips. These multicore chips entered the mainstream market a few years ago, and all vendors currently sell them. They are now standard kit in all laptops, desktops and smartphones.

Multicore chips are also more power efficient, and the number of cores able to be added is theoretically virtually unlimited.

Previously impossible computational tasks can now be achieved. And processes which previously took, days or even weeks to perform can now be done swiftly.

But while this new processing power enables computers to do things faster, it also adds new challenges.

Before Multicore computer software was written for a single central processing unit (CPU) in a chip. To exploit the potential of multicore chips, software now needs to be written while thinking in parallel.

But parallel programming is different than traditional programming, and so far few programmers have experience of it.

Multicore is a mainstream but (as yet) niche new technology.

In the next 10-15 years, there will be huge opportunities to translate sequential programming (‘traditional’) legacy code, and to create new software that takes full advantage of thousands of cores in the next generation of chips.

Around the world parallel computing is currently used to process vast quantities of data produced by the internet and the "big data" originating out of social networks and millions of intelligent data recording devices attached to the internet..

Here in NZ it is also used in the biggest CGI rendering facility in the world at Wellington's Weta Digital.

And soon it will be a key component of the information processing required to handle the data produced by the Square Kilometer Array radio - telescope – a global scientific project that New Zealand is a part of.

In addition, there is a wide range of services, solutions and systems integration challenges to connect the two world's together.

ENDS

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