Also worth reading is Ulrich Drepper's series on current and future
system architectures.  I've highlighted the important parts of this
long series below, but you can find the complete list of links at the
end of part 1.

  Part 1:
  http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/

  Part 2, on CPU caches:
  http://lwn.net/Articles/252125/

  Part 4, on NUMA:
  http://lwn.net/Articles/254445/

  Part 8, on future technologies:
  http://lwn.net/Articles/258154/

Uli has recently been advocating languages like OCaml (+ fork, numactl
and virtualization obviously) for future architectures which will
involve massive numbers of cores and very long paths to main memory.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat