Designing the hardware
Computer chips’ clocks have stopped getting faster. To maintain the regular doubling of computer power that we now take for granted, chip makers have been giving chips more “cores,” or processing units. But how to distribute computations across multiple cores is a hard problem, and this series of articles examines the different levels at which MIT researchers are tackling it, from hardware design up to the development of new programming languages.With the multicore chips in today’s personal computers, which might have four or six or even eight cores, splitting computational tasks hasn’t proved a huge problem. If the chip is running four programs — say, a word processor, an e-mail program, a Web browser and a media player — the operating system can assign each its own core. But in future chips, with hundreds or even thousands of cores, a single program will be split among multiple cores, which drastically...