A new simulation by Sandia for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has found that trying to use too many cores for multicore supercomputing processing just leads to slower, not faster, computations. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corp., a Lockheed Martin company. Using algorithms for deriving knowledge from large data sets, Sandia simulations found a significant increase in speed going from two to four multicores, but an insignificant increase from four to eight multicores.
