Sun's FORTRESS is now open source

http://fortress.sunsource.net/

Fortress code is concurrent by default and requires programmers to specify when a code section is not concurrent, which was my thinking also a few months ago.

Summary article here.

Sun has recently lost the continuation for a nice military contract for a new supercomputer architecture to IBM and Cray, and this open sourcing may have something to do with this loss.

Cringely says no apps for multicores in 2007

One of Cringely's predictions for 2007 involves multi-core chips and the difficulties of multithreading:

"5) AMD and Intel continue to beat the crap out of each other with customers gaining but wondering why there is no software that supports those new 8-way processors, as both compilers and third-party developers fail to keep up."

Unfortunately, he doen't mention ideas for solutions. Nevertheless, realizing that we have a problem would help us towards the solution.

Cringely has not predicted a wave of bugs appearing in old applications when people start using multicore chips. I wonder if he is aware of this possible future type of events.