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78 l New-Tech Magazine
Added Powell, “Today, there are 8.2
billion Bluetooth products in use,
and the enhancements in Bluetooth
5 and planned future Bluetooth
technical advancements mean that
Bluetooth will be in more than one-
third of all installed IoT devices by
2020. The drive and innovation of
Bluetooth will ensure our technology
continues to be the IoT solution of
choice for all developers. ”
The addition of the Bluetooth SIG’s
30,000th member company shows
that more and more companies
are choosing Bluetooth as both the
technology and the organization
that will help them develop IoT
products and services with the
best consumer experiences and
help bring those products and
services to market faster and more
successfully. Membership has
grown over 11 percent since the end
of 2015, now reaching a record-high
with its 30,000th member, Blossom
Group. The startup, which is building
infrasound and low-frequency noise
relaxation products, is just the latest
validation that companies of all sizes
and verticals are joining the SIG
because the organization is working
in collaboration with its members to
advance the technology and make
the world smarter, safer, better, and
more enjoyable.
“Implementing Bluetooth as our
wireless technology and joining
the SIG organization was the
obvious choice to ensure our
products’ success,” said Luke
Sanger, CEO and co-founder of
Blossom Group. “Bluetooth has
the ubiquity of a trusted wireless
communication platform and a
great history of supporting market
trends and working with developers
and members to produce ground-
breaking products and applications.
We know Bluetooth will stay
ahead of the game by working
with its members and embracing
technological advancements – from
power efficiency to IoT connectivity
– to push the limits of innovation.”
Parallel programming
made easy
New chip design makes parallel
programs run many times faster
and requires one-tenth the code.
Larry Hardesty | MIT News Office
Computer chips have stopped
getting faster. For the past 10 years,
chips’ performance improvements
have come from the addition of
processing units known as cores.
In theory, a program on a 64-core
machine would be 64 times as fast
as it would be on a single-core
machine. But it rarely works out
that way. Most computer programs
are sequential, and splitting them
up so that chunks of them can
run in parallel causes all kinds of
complications.
In the May/June issue of the
Institute
of
Electrical
and
Electronics Engineers’ journal
Micro, researchers from MIT’s
Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will
present a new chip design they call
Swarm, which should make parallel
programs not only much more
efficient but easier to write, too.
In simulations, the researchers
compared Swarm versions of six
common algorithms with the best
existing parallel versions, which
had been individually engineered
by seasoned software developers.
The Swarm versions were between
three and 18 times as fast, but they
generally required only one-tenth
as much code — or even less. And
in one case, Swarm achieved a
75-fold speedup on a program that
computer scientists had so far failed
to parallelize.
“Multicore systems are really
hard to program,” says Daniel
Sanchez, an assistant professor
in MIT’s Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science,
who led the project. “You have to
explicitly divide the work that you’re
doing into tasks, and then you need
to enforce some synchronization
between tasks accessing shared
data. What this architecture does,
essentially, is to remove all sorts
of explicit synchronization, to make
parallel programming much easier.
There’s an especially hard set of
applications that have resisted
parallelization for many, many
years, and those are the kinds of
applications we’ve focused on in
this paper.”
Many of those applications
involve the exploration of what
computer scientists call graphs. A
graph consists of nodes, typically
depicted as circles, and edges,
typically depicted as line segments
connecting the nodes. Frequently,
the edges have associated