Cores Enough to Compel Parallel Programming

Posted by James Reinders @ 05:17:AM | April 20, 2009

When will there be enough cores to make coding for concurrency worthwhile for you?

Recently, someone excited told me "Wow - everyone I talked with about their new use of parallel programming on a multicore system tells me they get significant performance gains - 50% or more, and 2X was common!"

Yes, I have the same experience. If you are skeptical, you are worrying that I'm saying everyone will see this benefit now - and that is clearly not true.

There is a cause and effect thing here - parallel programming is worth the effort if you see results. Those that found it worthwhile, do the work and report the results! A 2X speed-up on a key part of a program, is often worthwhile. Also, you might find a feature is doable whereas it was not previously - and that make the effort worthwhile.

You can never say "Parallel Programming is worthwhile for everyone." However, as the core count increases - the opportunity for 2X, or new features, continues to grow.

If you get 2X on two cores vs. 1X on one core, that is "perfect scaling." If you get 2X on 4 cores, that's not too bad. Someone in high performance computing (HPC) will probably tell you that 2X on 16 cores doesn't seem very impressive. That's because efficiency is very important in HPC.

Efficiency of this type, has never been the primary concern for non-HPC programming. Programmer productivity is much more important in general.

This begs the question, "If 2X is compelling for you, do you really care how many cores it takes?"

Assuming the answer is 'no' - we get to the question, "When will there be enough cores to make coding for concurrency worthwhile for you?"

This Week's Multicore Reading List
MATLAB and Google App Engine
Logging In C++ : Part 2
 Improving log granularity
A Conversation with BitMagic's Developer
Prefer Structured Lifetimes: Local, Nested, Bounded, Deterministic

All Feature Stories

Real World Parallelism Webinar Series

  • 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.