Before the era of multicore chips, performance gains in CPUs was achieved by a combination of ever increasing speed and architectural enhancements. This resulted in more and more power being consumed by the processor -- a situation that could not continue forever.

Earler this week I watched a webinar on Beyond “thinking” parallel:How to choose the right parallel programming model. The webinar was first of a series of webinars on Real World Parallelism that will be broadcast over the coming weeks. James Reinders took us through some pertinent questions about what we should expect of a parallel programming model, he then went on to give examples of how different current and emerging parallel technologies 'fit the bill'.

Over recent weeks Intel have been involved in some exiting developments that continue to strengthen contribution it is making to the world of parallel programming. Aquisition of Rapidmind and Cilk I'm sure will complement and enhance today's solutions that Intel offer. See Reinders on Rapidmind and Reinders on Cilk for more opinion on this.

Looking at my diary of events around multicore for the upcoming months, it seems clear to me that the world of Parallel Worlds is 'full speed ahead'.

I've just had 2 weeks vacation in South America. To help me cope with the long flight I bought a Samsung N110 - which has a battery life of over 9 hours. Also I figured the smaller size would be easier to work with whilst sitting in economy class. Irony was I missed my daytime flight, ended up travelling in the evening and so I slept rather than using the Netbook on the plane.

After a couple of days of being in Brazil, I got itchy fingers, and decided to test the Samsung N110 to see how it performed on parallel programs.
I built and ran my favourite Pi program using the Intel® Compiler that comes with Intel Parallel Studio, and got a performance boost of 1.47.

In the previous blog, I created an application that calculated the value of Pi. In this blog I show how to detect and correct the errors that I inadvertently introduced in my last posting.

Previously I examined a Dhrystone app and identified hotspots. Since then Intel Parallel Studio has been released, so I thought I'd convert the project to use it. This time I concentrate on converting my project to Visual Studio, then use Parallel Studio begin implementing parallelism.

When I first dipped my toes into parallel programming I hunted around for a legacy application to change from serial to parallel. Rather than work on one of my own apps, I looked for a serial application on the web that had lots of CPU activity. I ended up choosing the Dhrystone benchmark.

I recently spoke at the ACCU ("Association of C and C++ Users") Conference in the UK, with the title of my talk being "Seven Tips To Help Get You Started on Multicore".

In a crazy moment sometime ago I forked out a few UK Pounds registering a url how-parallel-is-your-software.com (not the real address). The plan was to use the site to let people register any applications they found that ran parallel. Perhaps even run a competition to see who could find the most parallel commercial application. Maybe this would be the route to me becoming the next dotcom millionaire! I never had the nerve to bring the idea to life. I suspect that the moment I published anything every lawyer in town would be knocking at my door.

Maybe it's just me, but I have to confess I'm no good at doing more than one thing at once. For example, I'm at the breakfast table reading the paper and eating, suddenly my wife comments "did you hear that? ...". Usually I haven't. My typical reply is "no - I was reading the paper".

Welcome to Parallel Worlds, a blog hosted by Stephen Blair-chappell. Stephen is a Technical Consulting Engineer at Intel, and has worked in the Intel Compiler Lab for the last 10 years. Prior to joining Intel, Stephen worked as a lecturer at the University of Central England, specializing in Software Engineering and Embedded Systems. Outside of work, Stephen enjoys playing the pipe organ, and is an accomplished musical instrument restore