Will we need a Fortress for our cores?

Two news theme over the last several months strikes me as mutally relevant.

First there is the information coming from Intel about future core densities. The Gulftown processor will likely make its debut in 2010 and will contain 32 cores. Intel research is also working on an 80-core research prototype. As the InformationWeek article discusses, software will need to change to accomodate.

Speaking of software, Java is a significant development language for the business world. What will business applications do with an 80-core engine? Multi-threaded applications - wherein the threads are explicit to the programmer are not the way to go. To the typically programmer I say "You can't handle the threads".

So what is the second news theme? Fortress - a research effort coming out of Sun Research. It is targeted at High Performance Computing; A replacement for Fortran. Am I suggesting that we rewrite all of our applications in Fortress? No. But Sun is implementing Fortress on the Java Virtual Machine. So there are some good possibilities that future Java language features will be able to drive out the same multi-threaded behaviour for which Fortress is striving.