Blog Archives

Making Multicore Happen

Beware of Those That Claim Linear Performance Increases
Posted by Markus Levy @ 03:36:PM | June 23, 2009

Allow me to begin this blog post with the summary: It really depends on the application.

Apple's Grand Central Dispatch: Path to Multicore
Posted by James Reinders @ 10:42:PM | Jun, 8, 2009

Apple has taken multicore to heart with Grand Central Dispatch, a deeply ingrained capability of their Snow Leopard OS to really help with using multicore parallelism. I'm a big fan, including the fact that it is not all new.

Of Quarks and Practical Parallel Programming
Posted by Jack Woehr @ 04:52:PM | May,18, 2009

In this conversation with Timothy G. Mattson, Senior Research Scientist Intel, Computational Software Lab, we find close agreement on the best approach to applying parallelism to business and general application programming. But first we discuss quantum physics.


Multicore Performance Benefits, Or Not
Posted by Markus Levy @ 03:21:PM | May, 1, 2009

Many embedded system designers are still struggling to determine whether multicore technology really buys them anything in terms of performance. Resolving this quandary requires a thorough understanding of the target application, the amount of time that must be invested to make the transition, and the characteristics of multicore processors that could be used.

Getting Started with OpenMP
Posted by Jack Woehr @ 03:05:AM | May, 1, 2009

A couple of quick ideas for getting started with OpenMP.


  1. Compile a cute example

  2. Read a book

Implementing a Standard
Posted by Markus Levy @ 07:28:PM | Mar,10, 2009

It's important to understand the difference between a standard (such as the Multicore Association's Multicore Communications API, "MCAPI") and the implementation of that standard (such as PolyCore Software's "Poly-Messenger/MCAPI"). In order for software developers to take advantage of a standard, there must be an implementation of that standard that supports the architectures on which the application developer wishes their software to run.

Moving Multithreaded Applications to Multicore
Posted by Markus Levy @ 05:49:PM | Jan,31, 2009

True of False? If you already have an application that is multithreaded and running on a multiprocessor system, moving to multicore is completely painless. Why are people making such a big deal of this 'multicore thing'?

Parallel Programming Via Committee
Posted by Markus Levy @ 12:25:PM | Jan,23, 2009

One of the biggest multicore challenges these days is converting those serial programs to parallel. The Silver Bullet is the tool that allows you to 'push a button' and voila - out pops parallel code. Many companies are working on proprietary solutions, all with varying degrees of functionality and purpose. There are also many efforts underway at the various research institutions (which include the development of new programming languages). How about if we alleviate some of the issues of parallel programming by combining forces and sharing knowledge and experiences? An effort is underway to develop a best practices guide by committee. I'll be back with some specific examples that have been contributed.

What Does it Take to Make Multicore Happen?
Posted by Markus Levy @ 06:42:PM | Jan,12, 2009

Welcome to my new blog. Chances are good that if you read this blog for the next 5 years, I'll have the opportunity to explain what it really takes to make multicore happen. One reason it will take so long is because it is a complex subject, and I'm probably not the first to tell you that. But the real reason is because most of the solutions to make multicore happen haven't even been created yet (although many vendors would beg to differ). Regardless of the reasons, I'll use this first session to share a bit of my background to give you a perspective on where I'll be coming from on my blogs....

Making Multicore Happen
Posted by Markus Levy @ 11:30:AM | Dec,31, 2008

Welcome to the "Making Multicore Happen" blog with Markus Levy as your host.

Calendar

June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008

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.