Computing as a Service in the Cloud Computing Stack: 1st Revisit

After the previous post about "A Speculation of Computing as a Service in the Cloud Computing Stack", I keep a close observation in the blogosphere to see if anyone in the world has similar ideas on what I proposed in the speculation. Two articles that I found today shed similar lights to the speculation: "The HPC Software Conundrum" and "Engineering Parallel Applications with Tunable Architectures" . The former article says

"... multi-core and streaming-core needs software in a big way. And, there is no sense in bragging about how well the hardware works unless there is an adequate software base to drive the hardware to its intended performance."

The author further lists out a number of solutions that are available today for programmers to use the great hardware and they are OpenMP, CUDA, OpenCL and Ct. However, the author points out that none of these solutions actually tell the programmers how should the code be updated/rewritten using this new tools, "no one size fits all or no silver bullet" as the author would say. He also says

"I still get the feel that it is a kludge of some sort and there should be a way to express what you want to do in a parallel cluster environment using a clear concise standard level of abstraction."

in which I agree with him. There is a need for a layer of abstraction that takes care of the hardware, be it SMP multi-core with or without GPU architecture. The layer of abstraction should be intelligent enough to make use of all the available hardware in the machine to improve the utilization.

The second article suggests a new approach to address the difficulty in adapting a serial program to a parallel program on the new hardware architecture. The new approach will automate the architecture adaptation of parallel programs and uses an auto-tuner to find the best-performing architectural choice for a given machine by introducing a new architecture description language based on parallel patterns and a framework for expressing architecture variants in a generic way. This is a step toward multi-core virtualization.

I wish to see more contributions on the software side to bring the programmers to this multi-core era!