Parallelaware

What's Intel's Motivation? More Q&A

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:44:25 -0500

On August 20, Go Parallel published an interview with James Reinders, director of Intel Software Development Products, about the new suite of products to expand the concurrency capabilities of Microsoft Visual Studio for C/C++ developers.

But what role should abstractions play in programming parallel processes? And what's Intel aiming for, anyway? Read on for intriguing answers to these questions.

IDF In Brief: Parallel Studio and Much, Much More

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 18:16:06 -0500

Highlights of the Intel Developer Forum at Moscone Center last week in San Francisco included talks from Intel execs Eric Kim, Renee James, and some in-the-trenches enthusiasts for parallel software development.

Sniffing Out Grand Central's Concurrency Secrets

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:51:51 -0500

Apple's June announcement of its forthcoming operating system update, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, contained a few teasers that have since been the subject of much speculation and little fact. Chief among them are the concurrency-related bits: GrandCentral and Open CL. While we're still combing the Interwebs for details, we did find these crumbs about GrandCentral from an attendee at the company's recent developer conference:

Concurrency Skills Key in Job Interviewing

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:33:19 -0500

Java expert David Dossot blogs recently about the process of interviewing Java developers, and offers some tips on what he's expecting from candidates these days. Near the top of the list: concurrency. Here's his take:

Learn Parallelism in Person

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:58:14 -0500

If you'd like to polish your parallel programming skills up before the end of the year, a highly recommended course by Microsoft Research faculty and author Herb Sutter may fit the bill: By way of Construx seminars, Sutter offers Effective Concurrency September 22-24, 2008 in Bellevue, WA, USA. Read on for highlights:

Unveiling the New TBB

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:02:19 -0500

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Intel released Threading Building Blocks 2.1 today.

What's new, you ask? Plenty, but read on for our highlights, or click here for the official word.

More TBB Help

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:53:27 -0500

Blogger Dave Vanden Bout (whose article currently appears on this portal) has been covering multi-core programming in a blog of his own entitled Parallel Panorama. He offers a useful table of contents for his TBB-related articles, reproduced here for your convenience.

Knuth's Rant

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:27:10 -0500

In an April 2008 interview on InformIT, Donald Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University, spoke with Andrew Binstock about various programming topics. While not central to the interview, his digression about multi-core programming is worth repeating in this space, although it disappointed many a reader who expected more from the father of open-source.

Can Apple Make Concurrency Fruitful for Developers?

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:59:49 -0500

Though there are as of yet no detailed explanations, Apple made grand claims on June 9, 2008 for its Mac OS X Snow Leopard, scheduled to ship in about a year. According to a press release, "Snow Leopard delivers unrivaled support for multi-core processors with a new technology code-namedGrand Central, making it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs." There has been some speculation that Grand Central may be a rival to TBB, or similar to Microsoft's Task Parallel Library for managed code. Though there are bound to be squabbles over the best implementation, it's clear that more entries into the fertile field of multi-threading tools bode well for the technology's future. Given the market evidence, it's getting harder and harder for developers to wait out concurrency from the safety of their serial programming bunkers...

More on TBB's parallel_reduce

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:37:19 -0500

From the horse's mouth... We're about to publish another Featured Algorithm article describing a real-world developer's experience with Intel Threading Building Blocks. Casting about for some more examples, I came across this excellent blog by Michael Voss, Observations from Parallel Sorting Part I: the subtleties of tbb::parallel_reduce.

Multi-core on YouTube

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:03:37 -0500

There are a plethora of multi-core and concurrent programming videos available on YouTube. Check out this Intel Second Life Summit on Multi-core and Software, in which experts from Intel, Microsoft and Dr. Dobbs journal hold a Second Life discussion on what software developers must do to take advantage of the new generation of multi-core computers.

Speakers include:
James Reinders, Chief Evangelist and Threading Guru for Intel Software Products
Tim Mattson, Intel Principal Engineer and developer of OpenMP
Herb Sutter, Architect, Microsoft, and chair of the ISO C++ Standards committee
Jonathan Erickson, Editorial Director, Dr. Dobb's, CMP Technology
Check out full video at http://slcn.tv/programs/intel

Gates Gets Concurrent

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:32:03 -0500

From Bill Gates' Microsoft Tech-Ed 2008 keynote speech yesterday in Orlando, Fla. (his last as full-time chairman of Microsoft):

"Looming after that, though, is an even more interesting challenge, which is the clock speed will not increase at the same rate it has over the last 30 years. It will largely stay the same, and the additional performance will come from having multiple execution units. And so the need to take programs and break them down into parallel execution units now becomes absolutely necessary to get the benefit of the exponential increase in transistors. We have an incredible amount of work at Microsoft to make the runtimes higher level, and to make it easy to take your code and write it in this parallel fashion. There will be a lot of discussion about this so-called 'multi-core' revolution in how we make sure we're all doing the best to take advantage of that."

Does Rent-a-Core Make Sense?

Sat, 31 May 2008 16:29:14 -0500

In a future hinted at by Intel's teraflop prototype processor, will usage-based pricing schemes allow customers and manufacturers to share in the multi-core wealth? That's the vision of Joseph Sloan and Rakesh Kumar, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their paper, "Hardware/System Support for Four Economic Models for Many Core Computing," proposes four related economic models for the many-core landscape.

Better Than a Sharp Stick

Thu, 22 May 2008 17:30:00 -0500

While cruising for the latest concurrency news, I came across a tool that isn't exactly new -- it's been around for 19 years -- but that's getting renewed attention beyond its niche in the high performance computing world: The TotalView Debugger. This eponymous product from TotalView Technologies in Natick, MA, targets advanced apps that perform such tasks as weather prediction, film special effects and animation, oil and gas exploration, CAD/CAM, aerospace and telecommunications

A Spectrum of Developer Opinion

Tue, 13 May 2008 20:13:57 -0500

This recent InfoWorld article ("Multi-core to leave developers in dust?" by columnist Bill Snyder) is somewhat late in reacting to the concurrency hype, though it provides a good overview of recent market maneuvers among chip makers and ISVs. However, it's worth reading for the comments alone. While there are only a dozen or so, they truly scatter across the spectrum of developer opinion about concurrency, from complete apathy to shoulder-shrugging mastery, anachronistic irony to futuristic fear. Read them and ponder...