"Actor Model The actor model (native to some programming languages such as Scala) is a pattern for concurrent computation that enables applications to take full advantage of multi-core and multi-processor computing. The fundamental idea behind the actor model is that the application is broken up into "actors" that perform particular roles. Every method call (or message) to an actor is executed in a unique thread, so you avoid all of the contested locking issues typically found in concurrent applications. This allows for more efficient concurrent processing while keeping the complexity of actor implementations low, as there is no need to consider concurrent execution within each actor implementation."
"RapidMind and JetBrains are respectively boosting products for parallel programming and Java, with RapidMind adding standards support and JetBrains emphasizing SQL capabilities."
"SAN FRANCISCO (11/04/2008) - With the advent of multicore processors such as the Intel Core Duo, which is now commonplace in PCs, software developers must deal with a new wrinkle -- getting software to be processed across multiple cores -- in order to ensure the maximum performance from their software. But this is much easier said than done, with developers having to tackle issues with concurrency and potential performance bottlenecks. Already, 71 percent of organizations are developing multithreaded applications for multicore hardware, according to a recent IDC survey sponsored by tool vendor Coverity."
"It's a well-known fact that hardware companies are abandoning the race for single-CPU speed and instead are focusing on multicore processors. Despite the fact that many algorithms can be easily parallelized, most client-side Java code is still written for single-CPU systems. In this article Kirill Grouchnikov shows you how to fine-tune a core JDK array-sorting algorithm for improved processing speed of as much as 35%."
"SAN FRANCISCO (08/04/2008) - Call it the great multicore discord: a parade of major hardware and software vendors promising desktop applications powered by multicore chips yet all marching out of step, leaving confused software developers in the dust -- but times are changing."
"In the beginning, a CPU could write directly to memory simply by wiggling the voltages on a few wires that connected the CPU chip to the memory chip. All was well with the world. Even with multithreaded systems, only one path to memory existed, and reads and writes to memory always occurred whenever the CPU executed the associated machine instruction. The introduction of memory caches didn't fundamentally change that model (once they got the cache-coherency bugs worked out). Indeed, the cache is transparent to the program if it's implemented correctly. That simple memory model -- the CPU issues an instruction that modifies memory with an immediate effect -- remains in most programmers' minds."
