Getting to the core of multicore development
May 15, 2010 —
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To cheat or not to cheat. This is the central question for developers faced with an ever-growing number of processor cores in their servers. For the absolute best results, it's long been understood that development managers and software architects needed to change practices and policies from the ground up. But virtualization makes possible another avenue, one that some would deem to be “cheating.”
Matt Lavallee, director of technology at Multiple Listing Service Property Information Network, said that virtualization allows applications that scale across a data center to also scale across a multicore server's processor.
“Virtualization lets you cheat," he said. "Instead of having to learn how to scale, you can run multiple nodes in parallel. That's the approach we took with our Web servers. Instead of adapting and rewriting, we just run 10 times as many servers on one box."
Cheating or not, it's a quick fix for a difficult problem, and determining which approach is best suited to your application could be an even tougher proposition.
Behrooz Zahiri, product marketing manager at Coverity, said that choosing between multithreading and distributed computing is an application-specific affair.
“They both are forms of multitasking, but they are quite different," he said. "Running on virtual machines is easier, but it usually provides suboptimal results. Sometimes an application is a good fit for the divide-and-conquer approach. If it doesn't have a lot of dependencies, you can cut it into pieces and do some merging at the end."
But Irv Badr, senior product manager at IBM Software's Rational division, said that smart developers know where to let the operating system handle multicore, and when to take hold of threads themselves.
“It is advisable to defer the core affinity and runtime scheduling for multicore to the OS. In order to maximize gains from this revolutionary technology, the architect and systems engineers should own the top-level multicore architecture," he said. "This allows them to be closer to the stakeholder and customers and control their multicore experiences."
No more free rides
Bruce Wright, director of operations at search engine company Kosmix.com, said that the ever-increasing number of cores in server processors forces developers to stop relying on Moore's law to improve performance.
Related Search Term(s): multicore, virtualization
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