Be parallel or perish! - CIOL Interviews

Be parallel, or perish!

Parallelism offers new doors, and creativity is required to open these new doors, says Intel

Pradeep Chakraborty

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Training programs
Intel launched a University program two years ago (Go Parallel or Perish). As of the end of 2007, 407 institutions globally have signed up. About 200 of these are from India.

Bhandari added that Intel has a generation of programmers who have written code with non-parallel environments. "Parallelism skill is now going to be critical. Curriculum changes at institutes do not happen overnight. However, IIT-Kanpur built a curriculum two years ago and open sourced it," he pointed out.

"We also talked to NIIT. We introduced parallelism in their curriculum. This was 18 months ago. Elements of our courses are also going on at G-NIIT. The NIITs have large scale and scope," he added.

According to Reinders, most of the professors that Intel meets do touch upon parallelism in their classes. "We've also seen improvements at the UG level."

Open Source
The fact that Intel does a lot of work on open source is perhaps, not well publicized. Reinders noted: "We do a lot of work in Open Source, and are right behind IBM and Red Hat. Linux eats up more power. The impact is the same on laptops and servers. We came up with seven different patches. Cutting power consumption on Linux devices is something that Intel is good at."

Intel also does a lot of seminars and other software partner programs. Reinders said: "Our focus is more toward the developer community. DRDO and BHEL are some of the customers in India who have benefited from our software development."

Two of Intel's customers have actually applauded the company for its good work in parallelism. The Institute of Mathematical Sciences of India (IMSI) in Chennai has used it for:

• Application: Quantum Physics – Research – Lattice Structures
• Intel Software: Intel C++ Compilers for Linux
• Intel processors: Xeon processors
• Results : using Intel C++ Compiler helped IMSC improve performance of application by 2X

Professor Haridas, IMSI, said, “The Intel compilers have helped me significantly reduce the time taken to execute my application and enabled me."

Similarly, Philips Medical has used parallelism in medical diagnostics. The details are as follows:

• Application : Medical diagnostics equipment
• Intel Software : Intel C++ Compilers
• Intel processors : Xeon processors with Intel EM64T technology, Pentium 4 processors
• Results : Best all-around performance by Intel C++ Compiler

A company spokesperson from Philips Medical, said: "At Philips Medical, we develop software for some of our medical diagnostic products using the Intel C++ Compiler. We found the performance of our applications to be excellent and were pleased to find that we could use the Intel compiler on both Intel and non-Intel 32 and 64-bit processors in combination with different Microsoft compilers. The main features of the compiler that we rely on are the support and optimized code generation for intrinsic (MMX, SSE, SSE2), automatic vectorization, and OpenMP support . Regardless of the processor, we found that the Intel compiler offered the best all-around performance."

According to Intel, programmers have three immediate challenges with parallelism: scalability, correctness and maiintainability. The rules of the thumb, as outlined by Intel are:

• Think parallel.
• Program using abstraction.
• Program in tasks (chores), not threads (cores).
• Design with the option to turn concurrency off.
• Avoid using locks.
• Use tools and libraries designed to help with concurrency.
• Use scalable memory allocators.
• Design to scale through increased workloads.

Parallelism offers new doors. Creativity is required to open these new doors. Developers would do well to look for these doors. Without any doubt, parallelism is central to Intel's products. Multi-core needs parallel applications. Therefore, developers need to learn to either think and be parallel, or perish!

©CIOL Bureau

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