Intel has released Parallel Studio 2011, a suite of tools intended to simplify and speed up the development of parallel programs running on multicore architectures. Based on the Parallel Studio package released last year, Parallel Studio 2011 adds expanded threading libraries and a threading advisor to its C++ compiler, error-checking and profiling tools.
It's the talk of the Internet and around water coolers: Did Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician at HP Labs, really produce the proof for P ≠ NP? If so, it's sure to be a “Moment of Geek” on Rachel Maddow's show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann's “What will you be talking about tomorrow?”, Rick's List or even a mention by Rush (maybe not).
Today's article examines superscalar programming techniques on HyperThread and Shared cache systems.
We are asked the question about retrofitting single threaded or single tasking applications allot. Why? If it's not broke, then leave the poor application alone -- right?
The application development platform for Windows Phone 7 Series is Silverlight. Silverlight for Windows Phone supports core Silverlight features, including the .NET threading model. Windows Phones Games based on XNA Framework also support the .NET threading model. Therefore, if you develop applications that target a Windows Phone 7 Series device with a dual-core microprocessor, you can work with multithreaded code to take advantage of the two cores.
When you write concurrent code that has to make changes to shared variables, you might think that a mutual-exclusion lock is necessary to perform each update operation. In some cases, you can replace a mutual-exclusion lock with a more efficient atomic operation and you can boost both your application's performance and scalability.
From what I can tell, the consensus is that Intel's Parallel Studio is a fine piece of work for Windows C\C++ programmers who write and develop programs using Microsoft Visual Studio.
We do pause and wonder when we hear some of the many ad-hoc attempts that software providers are using to take advantage of multicore processors. It's not that we believe that serial processing or single tasking software can't be retrofitted. It's really a matter of whether the architecture and foundation of the original software can handle the retrofit.
It's late Friday and it's been a long week. You've been 12 hours coding, compiling, and crashing with a piece of multithreaded software for the lastvsix days straight. You were mocked by nasty hard-to-find freezes, and hard to explain (no impossible to explain) errors. But finally, it's working.
The original Star Trek episode 'Trouble with Tribbles' was not exactly my favorite episode. Far from it as a matter of fact. But now it has revitalized itself for me because 'the trouble' in this episode describes a very fascinating situation.
| The best use of parallel/multicore systems is: |
| Gaming |
 25%
|
| Scientific simulation |
 56%
|
| Data mining |
 10%
|
| Calculating monthly expense report |
 1%
|
| Movies and high-quality video |
 4%
|
| Server consolidation |
 4%
|
Array Building Blocks: A Flexible Parallel Programming Model for Multicore and Many-Core Architectures
Array Building Blocks provides developers with advanced data-parallel programming capabilities
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