I attended IDF this past week and while there was quite a bit of noise about Nehalem and Intel's new 3GL parallel development tools, you can read about that stuff anywhere.
I suppose you can also read somewhere about Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks giving a talk during the software keynote (about this)-- wow, I can't wait until we have that kind of marketing budget. There were polarized glasses under all our chairs and they slid out a movie theater sized screen to show 3D scenes from Kung Fu Panda. Kind of a different feel from Werner's Intel Cluster Ready talk.
On entering the exhibition area, as usual, I went directly to the little booths at the back. The nice thing about the little booths is that you probably haven't seen what they are showing before and usually, you get to talk to people that are the ones directly working with the technology.
The exhibit I found most interesting was one put on by an Intel "lablet" located somewhere in or near CMU. The overall project is called Diamond and it is directed at interactive search of non-indexed data. Richard Gass and Mei Chen were demonstrating an application built on top of Diamond called Interactive Search Assisted Decision Support (ISADS) which allows very large numbers of images to be searched to find ones similar to an image of interest.
At the show, they had a special camera which they used to capture images of moles (yes, a charming photo of a mole on my forearm was taken...). The system searches a large database of other images to find a similar match.
The search infrastructure lets the main application send "searchlets" to a distributed set of nodes that each search locally for matches. The fancy part is some interactivity on the balance between accuracy and number of matches.
You don't get high performance without a good balance between CPU, memory and i/o. Often, the CPU side gets too much attention. It's always good to see people working on the full problem. Hopefully readers of this blog already know that Star-P supports parallel file i/o!
More info on the Diamond project can also be found here.