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Michael Wrinn (Intel)

Michael Wrinn manages Intel's Innovative Software Education team, which collaborates with universities to bring parallel computing to the mainstream of undergraduate education. His prior assignments include managing Intel's software engineering lab in Shanghai, and directing the human interface technology research. He was Intel's representative to the committee which produced the first OpenMP specification, and remains active in the parallel computing community. Before joining Intel, Michael worked at Accelrys (San Diego), implementing commercial and research simulation codes on a wide variety of parallel/HPC systems. He holds a Ph.D. (in quantum mechanics) and a B.Sc.(math/chemistry/physics) from McGill University.

Wisdom of crowds? House, and ground loops.

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on September 29, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Comments (1)

There is a standing literature for "crowd sourcing";  an early example is Surowiecki's 2004 The Wisdom of Crowds, which asserts that groups can be "smarter than the smartest people in them". Last night's episode of House played on this notion, with a patient soliciting diagnostic information from the online crowd. As dramatized, it turned out that one [...]

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Category: Academic, Uncategorized

SIGCSE thoughts: Preparing Students for Ubiquitous Parallelism

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on April 1, 2009 at 3:27 pm
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The 2009 SIGCSE conference was my second, and I was alert for changes, one year on, in awareness and attitudes toward parallel computing. These turned out to be profound, noticeable and widespread. In 2008, you'd meet suprise (Parallel computing is already here?), complacency (Parallel computing might be important in the future) and skepticism (Parallel computing is always important in the future). [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core, Software Engineering

Top 10 challenges in parallel computing

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on December 31, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Comments (1)

In the spirit of yearend, top 10 lists, here is one for parallel computing. A version appeared earlier this year in a paper with Tim Mattson, who's talked about this in other forums and gets full credit for its collation; it reflects thinking by some of the folks here, and is worth posting for discussion. Note the list is for [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

Parallel Education Panel discussions -- 2008 roundup, recurring themes

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on December 31, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Comments (1)

With the video posted earlier this month (December, still, as I write here) of the SC 08 Education Birds of a Feather, There Is No More Sequential Programming, So Why Are We Still Teaching It?, I got to review that BoF for memorable nuggets (see it listed here, parts 1 through 7), and noticed themes [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

Creating a Pattern Language for Parallel Programming: the evolving view from Berkeley

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on December 8, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Comments (3)

One day after its official opening last week, Berkeley's ParLab hosted an informal workshop on writing design patterns -- specifically, parallel design patterns. Participants were a diverse group, from academics (profs and grad students), research labs, and industry; prior pattern-writing experience ranged from guru to utter novice (I filled that particular slot in the roster). We were guided [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core, Software Engineering

Ranking concurrency courseware -- Digg it?

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on November 25, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Comments (5)

One excellent trend in university practice is the posting of course content, usually under a Creative Commons arrangement, for use by any and all. This is true, as well, for the growing and very important portfolio for parallel programming, or more broadly, concurrency.  In addition to the many universites doing this, key industry players such as Google, [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

IDF Concurrency panel follow up -- performance fundamentals matter

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on August 29, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Comments (3)

Our IDF panel (officially, the Academic Community Multi-core Programming Roundable) brought some lively points of view, and at least one recurrent theme. First, the points of view: Dan Garcia gave a quick overview of the UC Berkeley approach; they really *do* get the new kids coding a version of MapReduce - in the first school term. [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

Software Concurrency for undergrads? Panel discussion at IDF

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on August 13, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Comments (4)

The Intel Developer Forum, in San Francisco August 19-21, brings this year a series of talks and workshops of particular interest to the academic community: a chalk talk on research collaboration in parallel computing, a technical session on expressing parallelism, a threading self-paced lab - details of these and more may be found here. One of these is [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

Pushing Concurrency at ITiCSE Madrid

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on July 18, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Comments (0)

ITiCSE, the ACM (and others) sponsored conference on "Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education", took place earlier this month in Madrid; Intel was among the corporate sponsors. The event is, in some sense, a European version of SIGCSE, but on a more intimate scale, omitting, almost entirely, the industry-exhibitor portion (think textbooks) so prominent at the American event. I had [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

DAC, part 1: the NVidia tutorial, an ecumenical approach

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on June 13, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Comments (1)

This week's Design Automation Conference, in Anaheim, included a full-day tutorial called "Programming Massively Parallel Processors: The NVIDIA Exprience". Since my own talk was not until next day, I went ahead and enrolled. As expected, this covered the CUDA programming model in detail -- handling host-device communication ("device" being the NVidia processor, G80 in this case), [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

Parallel computing: disappearing from CS curricula???

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on May 2, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Comments (2)

Now that multicore computing platforms are standard issue (can you even find a single-core system for sale?), a fraction of the academic community is beginning to at least think about adjusting their teaching focus, to align with this reality. Given that context, it was startling to hear a panelist at IPDPS (in Miami, a couple of [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

SIGCSE impressions, from a first-timer

By Michael Wrinn (Intel) (12 posts) on March 24, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Comments (7)

I had the pleasure this month of attending my first SIGCSE conference, conveniently located in Portland, within walking distance of home. Now that a week's gone by, a couple of impressions stand out: 1. The tone, compared to a typical academic conference, was remarkably congenial. Technical conferences, in my experience, tend to be combative (everyone's chasing [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core