Fri 12 October 2007
CTech has announced that the next version of it's flagship software package, EVS (Environmental Visualization System), will take full advantage of multiple processors.
My experience with EVS is mostly in the realm of 3-dimensional kriging and geostatistics. Given the amount of data crunching involved, it's always been sluggish when dealing with a non-trivial amount of data. Nothing is more frustrating that seeing one of your CPU cores cranking away while the others sit idle! But some users are reporting that the new multithreaded modules get nearly linear performance increases when adding more processing cores.
CTech is certainly not the first scientific/geostats application to go parallel. But it is the first program that I personally use on a regular basis that will take advantage of a multi-processor system. I hope this marks the beginning of an industry trend in that direction.