No backtalk
Computer chips’ clocks have stopped getting faster. To maintain the regular doubling of computer power that we now take for granted, chip makers have been giving chips more “cores,” or processing units. But how to distribute computations across multiple cores is a hard problem, and this five-part series of articles examines the different levels at which MIT researchers are tackling it, from hardware design up to the development of new programming languages.In the mid-1990s, Matteo Frigo, a graduate student in the research group of computer-science professor Charles Leiserson (whose work was profiled in the previous installment in this series), developed a parallel version of a fast Fourier transform (FFT). One of the most frequently used classes of algorithms in computer science, FFTs are useful for signal processing, image processing, and data compression, among other things. Steven Johnson, then a graduate student in physics, was...