The Berkeley Par Lab: Progress in the Parallel Computing Landscape

This book is the first collection of papers and essays to present a comprehensive view of how parallel computing will transform the experience of using computers. It lays the groundwork for a new generation of systems and applications that will not only change the industry; it will usher in the next revolution in computing.
This book describes the University of California, Berkeley, response to the 2007 challenge from Intel and Microsoft to understand the impact multicore parallel processing will have on the software, hardware and applications we will all use in the future. The Berkeley Parallel Computing Laboratory (Par Lab) was created to address this challenge. This book describes the results of that investigation. It is composed of four parts containing original essays and reprints of seminal papers published by the Berkeley Par Lab team.
• Part I has the applications that drove the project—browsers, speech, music, vision, and health—which ran 100 to 250 times faster on parallel hardware.
• Part II covers the pattern language that evolved from the 13 dwarfs, award-winning research on parallel validation, and a breakthrough call communication avoiding algorithms, which by themselves have accelerated many codes thought to be invulnerable to further parallel innovation.
• Part III covers the Par Lab system stack, including advanced in autotuners, program synthesis, operating systems, and specializers. This last item allows programmers to write in highly productive languages like Python but get the performance and energy efficiency of languages like C++ and CUDA.
• Part IV documents the educational impact and the next set of challenges for the Par Lab faculty.