Mountain View: Efficient and accessible? Addressing new architectures in C++

Moore's law is failing, as many have observed. Physical limits on the design of processors mean that it is no longer true that CPUs will simply scale in performance from year to year. Processor designers have attempted to address these limitations using deep cache hierarchies, vector pipelines and increasing core counts but exploiting these capabilities tends to need changes in algorithms and data structures.

I will discuss the nature of this challenge, the reasons behind it and what can be done to address it and most importantly, if this can be achieved while maintaining, or even improving, the expressiveness of code. While the abstract machine model underlying C is a thing of the past, I'll include working examples of what can be achieved in C++.

Robin Williams
Robin has spent over 25 years trying to cram astronomical nebulae into computers and hasn't given up yet. He has developed code for platforms from embedded control systems to large HPC clusters, in C, C++ and Fortran, and was one of the early developers of the PDL data processing module for Perl.

Join us after the talk at the Tied House for drinks and food!