Before the era of multicore chips, performance gains in CPUs was achieved by a combination of ever increasing speed and architectural enhancements. This resulted in more and more power being consumed by the processor -- a situation that could not continue forever.
As I sit at my computer with it multicores considering the advantages of parallelism, faster computers, better performance, a strange feeling comes over me, 'Haven't I heard this before?'
Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 (64-bits version) offer new NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) support. Therefore, it is very important for Windows developers to understand the differences found in the complex underlying multicore and manycore hardware. Coreinfo is a very simple yet powerful command-line utility that shows you very useful information about the processors, their organization and the cache topology.
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 includes many interesting improvements related to its multicore programming features. The parallelism and concurrency profiling tools allow developers to visualize the behavior of a multithreaded application on multicore microprocessors and collect resource contention data.
Microsoft released the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 that comes with the new .Net Framework 4.0 Beta 2. The previous Beta 1 offered many interesting features that empowered parallel programming using the supported languages. However, the IDE had many important performance problems.
Of course we're a little jealous of those developers who get to develop those fun and nifty IPhone apps! Perhaps we're just a tad bit curious too. But for the moment we are absolutely in the grips of a very different kind of software development.
On one hand it's funny. On the other hand, well ... it's funny. It's probably a matter of poetic justice being served up. Something I did or something Tracey did in a past life. But recently we seem unable to escape conversations that end up in questions (which we normally evade) about what we do.
Earler this week I watched a webinar on Beyond “thinking” parallel:How to choose the right parallel programming model. The webinar was first of a series of webinars on Real World Parallelism that will be broadcast over the coming weeks. James Reinders took us through some pertinent questions about what we should expect of a parallel programming model, he then went on to give examples of how different current and emerging parallel technologies 'fit the bill'.
Over recent weeks Intel have been involved in some exiting developments that continue to strengthen contribution it is making to the world of parallel programming. Aquisition of Rapidmind and Cilk I'm sure will complement and enhance today's solutions that Intel offer. See Reinders on Rapidmind and Reinders on Cilk for more opinion on this.
Looking at my diary of events around multicore for the upcoming months, it seems clear to me that the world of Parallel Worlds is 'full speed ahead'.
Moblin v2.0 for Intel Atom Processor based netbooks is already available. Developers with Linux experience will find it easy to target this new attractive platform. However, many developers have many questions related to the multicore support offered this new operating system.
| My main development machine has: |
| 1 core |
 14%
|
| 2 cores |
 38%
|
| 4 cores |
 24%
|
| 8 cores |
 12%
|
| A whole bunch more cores |
 13%
|
Multicore-enabling the N-Queens Problem Using Cilk++
November 17, 2009
Visual Effects for Animation - presented by DreamWorks Animation
Speaker: Ron Henderson (Bio)
Ron Henderson manages the FX Tools group at DreamWorks Animation, where he is responsible for developing physical simulation and procedural modeling tools. These systems have been used for key visual effects in recent films such as Kung Fu Panda and Monsters vs. Aliens (March 2009).
Prior to joining DreamWorks in 2002 he was a senior scientist at Caltech with a joint appointment to the Applied Math and Aeronautics departments, where he worked on efficient techniques for the direct numerical simulation of fluid turbulence.
Abstract:
In this webinar, Ron Henderson will show examples of visual effects, from hair and feathers to smoke and fire, from a variety of DreamWorks Animation feature films. He will discuss in general terms the kinds of techniques used to achieve particular visual effects. Finally, Henderson will show a detailed breakdown of the dam-breaking scene from Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, demonstrating how different elements of key frame animation, simulation, and rendering are combined in a real production shot.
December 1, 2009
A Quick and Easy Way to Parallelize a Legacy Codebase with Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBBs)
Speaker: Bernard Laberge, Avid, Senior Principal Engineer (Bio)
Bernard Laberge is a senior principal engineer in the video editors division at Avid. During his seven years with the company he has been actively involved in the replacement of the legacy video processing engines used by Avid editors with a common hardware-abstracted, component-based video processing engine currently running on the CPU with SIMD optimized code, GPU, and dedicated hardware.
Abstract:
Learn how to overcome the limitations of a thread-based scheduler, including dealing with the absence of recursive parallelism support and the inefficient handling of unbalanced processing load. Bernard Laberge addresses how Avid resolved the expensive refactoring of their thread-based scheduler into a task-based solution by choosing Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBBs). He explores how Avid was able to easily integrate the Intel TBBs into their video editor applications and more than 5 million lines of code.
December 15, 2009
How to Use Intel® Parallel Studio to Streamline Code Development in a Multicore Environment
Speaker: Matt Dunbar, Director for Performance Technology, SIMULIA (Bio)
Matt Dunbar is the director for performance technology at SIMULIA. Since joining the company in 1993, he has worked on parallelization of the Abaqus suite of products, initially for shared memory architectures and more recently for distributed memory architectures. Dunbar has also been intimately involved in selecting both the hardware and software tools used in the development of the Abaqus product line.
Abstract:
Resolve elusive, costly multithreading errors quickly and efficiently with Intel® Parallel Studio. While many coding problems that lead to bugs in software applications are typically straightforward logic errors, errors in managing memory and in multithreading code can sometimes take weeks to months to diagnose and fix. Matt Dunbar explores how and why taking advantage of multicore processors through multithreaded code is critical for compute-intensive applications. While spotlighting his work on SIMULIA's Abaqus finite element solver, Dunbar addresses the need for multicore execution and shares his experiences using Intel Parallel Studio to streamline code development in a multicore environment.
