Rich Services Cloud Applications Require Parallel Programming Skills

Posted by Gaston Hillar @ 04:06:PM | October 5, 2009

The interest on Rich Services Cloud Applications is growing fast. Users want responsive and immersive interactions from any locations. Nowadays, you cannot think about a business application without mobility in mind. However, you cannot avoid creating a rich user experience (UX) in mobile devices whilst accessing services on the cloud. If you want to offer a really nice experience, you'll have to use parallel programming skills everywhere.

Mobile devices always evolve. However, users also evolve. Users are always demanding new experiences, additional features and mobility for their applications. When a user buys a netbook, he understands it has less power than a notebook. Therefore, he uses the netbook to watch the videos edited on his notebook. He uses the netbook to watch the 3D animations rendered on his desktop computer. A few weeks later, he'll be installing the video editing tools and the 3D animation software in the netbook and he'll be trying to finish the 3D dragon animation whilst fishing.

These mobile devices do not have the same processing power than notebooks, desktop computers or servers. Nevertheless, they can consume services from the cloud and many of them can already take advantage of parallel code, as I explained in my previous post "Downsizing Multicore Programming Skills to Take Advantage of Intel Atom".

Rich Services Cloud Applications will allow mobile users to access powerful applications from any locations. A user can apply complex effects to a photo using services provided by the cloud. The application is going to display a rich front-end, with asynchronous code consuming services, offering a responsive user experience taking advantage of parallelized client-side algorithms. The most complex and time-consuming services are going to run in the cloud, taking advantage of powerful manycore systems. The user experience is not going to be created using serial code. It is going to be a rich application with asynchronous and parallel code.

This way, creating Rich Services Cloud Applications, mobile users will have access to powerful applications and services from any locations and from heterogeneous mobile devices. The common denominator is going to be the code optimized to take advantage of parallelized hardware.

Rich Services Cloud Applications will require parallel programming skills to offer responsive and rich experiences in modern hardware. They are going to be built using many different programming languages, technologies and platforms. However, they are going to run parallelized algorithms and asynchronous code everywhere.

The idea is very simple and powerful. You'll find hundreds of Rich Services Cloud Applications already running. If you combine client-side parallelism with cloud-side parallelism, you'll be able to take advantage of modern hardware and offer users the most exciting immersive interactions.

Rich Internet Applications are moving to the Cloud and the most simple way to gain a competitive advantage in this move is to go parallel to take advantage of modern hardware everywhere.

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.