Intel's Software Tools group has announced a cloud-based "scalability service." The Intel Parallel Universe Portal is an on-demand cloud-computing analysis tool that tests 32-bit Windows-based parallel applications. The service lets software developers assess how their applications will perform on a number of multicore processor configurations -- 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 hardware threads -- without having large multicore systems in-house.
Essentially, what Intel has done is reuse in the cloud the technology currently being used by its Parallel Amplifier tool (part of the Parallel Studio tool suite), which is designed to find multicore performance bottlenecks. The results of the analysis can then be used in Intel Parallel Studio for further analysis regarding concurrency, locks and waits, and performance bottlenecks.
The service is free and there's nothing to install. All you have to do is upload a binary, specify the configuration, and after 2 or 3 minutes, you get a graphical report. And remember the whole point of the effort is to see how your app scales. Will it run as efficiently on 16 threads as it does on a single thread?
