SHANGHAI, CHINA--Programming is changing with the rise of multicore technology, and Intel is working with governments and ministries of education around the globe to ensure that the latest generation of graduates have the right skills around open source and multi-threaded programming.
Intel vice-president and general manager of the software and solutions group Renee James said that the new areas of focus today are mobility, multi-core, visual computing and the actual software development process.
"The software world is changing, today we are facing the greatest changes in the last decades in three key elements: Where software is being developed; how software is being developed; and the rapid change in users' expectations for want they want with computing," she said.
James explained that in 1996, developers were concentrated in Europe and in North America. By 2011, that will have shifted to the emerging economies with the greatest concentration in China which also benefits from a healthy hardware environment to support its software sector. Intel has been working with ministries of education around the world to help develop and put in place courses on multi-core programming and software park programs.
"Parallelism and the ability to write threaded code is one of the most important areas in computer science today. The other key trend change is open source which has changed the way a developer views tools, community and open modules they use to create software. Open source unlocks creativity and allows for rapid development using simplified scripting languages and re-use of open source code. The trend is to rapidly develop, test your ideas with the community and move forward. Gartner said that by 2011, 80 percent of all software will have an open source component."
James said that until now, one of the key things that has been missing from the open source development environment is a test and validation service to allow developers to test their software's compatibility with another's stack. Starting immediately, Intel now offers such a service through the acquisition of Spike Source on both Linux and Windows.
Now that Intel has launched a new class of device, the Mobile Internet Device (MID), James said that this needs a new software environment and ecosystem to flourish. Traditionally portable devices and phones have had their own proprietary systems which leads to slower development and incompatibility.
Moblin.org is a new initiative with Intel, Ubuntu and Asianux (which includes Red Flag Linux) and more than 500 other partners aimed at creating this new ecosystem.
James said that one of the key drivers for mobile computing today is gaming, and that is going to change with multicore, multi-threaded systems that provide more life-like physics, smoke and lighting than was ever possible before.
In another IDF presentation, VMWare co-founder Dr Mendel Rosenblum said that the promise of virtualization was for an IT department to virtualize all its machines and hand over to the virtual infrastructure the task of packing the virtual machines as efficiently as possible.
He said that Intel's new Flex Migration technology would make possible the IT manager's dream of simply buying new processing power and throwing it into a pool that will be automatically managed by virtualization software.
When the virtual infrastructure detects a load imbalance, it can invoke VMWare's Vmotion technology to move the virtual machine around to a less loaded server. During lulls, it can pack more virtual machines on a single physical machine and power down machines to conserver power. When demands grow, the IT department can simply buy more hardware and drop it into the virtual pool, with VMWare's ESX3i automatically making use of it.
However, in the real world, that does not always work, as Intel comes up with new processors that do not always work with Vmotion and confuses software which expect a certain processor.
"We turned to Intel for help and it came up with FlexMigration to allow for pools," Rosenblum said. This allows new hardware to look like old hardware.
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