Intel, Microsoft converge on parallel computing

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By David Worthington

August 20, 2008 — Wintel is entering the era of parallelism in lockstep. Intel is partnering with Microsoft to create a suite of interoperable tools for parallel programming in Visual Studio in C and C++.

Today, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel announced that it will be conducting open beta tests of Intel Parallel Studio products beginning late this year and through mid-2009. The studio consists of four separate components for code analysis, design, debugging and performance tuning that integrate with Visual Studio.

Intel will standardize on Microsoft’s forthcoming concurrency runtime for Windows to ensure application and tool interoperability. The runtime will be included with the next version of Visual Studio, said James Reinders, chief product evangelist and director of marketing for Intel’s Software Development Products Division.

“The [Microsoft] concurrency runtime gives interoperability and [helps Intel] to keep as reasonable programming style far into the future,” he said.

Intel Parallel Advisor is the analysis piece. It examines existing source code to advise developers on where they can inject parallelism into their code, makes recommendations on how to implement threads, and identifies potential conflicts as well as suggesting ways to resolve them.

“[Parallel Advisor] will give hints to barriers, and that could come down to mundane details like a global data structure that may limit scalability,” said Reinders. The tool is not completely automatic; developers must still recognize when a particular problem might lend itself to parallelism, he noted.

A beta of Parallel Advisor will ship in mid-2009, with the final product becoming generally available before the end of the year, according to Intel.

For cases where parallelism is warranted, Intel Parallel Composer provides a compiler and libraries for parallel development in Visual Studio without low-level thread management.

The concurrency functions of the OpenMP 3.0 API specification will be supported, in addition to including an assortment of Intel created domain specific libraries (Threading Building Blocks), and Intel’s Integrated Performance Primitives for software functions in multimedia data processing, and communications applications.

It uses the same 11.0 series compiler that is presently in beta, and will be released for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows in November, according to Intel. Intel will duplicate the tight GUI integration it has with Visual Studio in Eclipse and Apple Xcode, but it will not have any deliverables for at least the next year, said Reinders.

Likewise, Parallel Studio is not an all-or-nothing proposition: Developers are not required to switch to Intel’s compilers to use the tools, and they are design for individual use, said Reinders.

He noted that Intel would be “strongly adhering” to standards to C and C++ for code portability with non-Windows platforms. Intel has added Lambda functions, which are C++ futures that are not yet a part of the standard. “We are convinced that the C++ committee will add it,” Reinders explained.

Parallel Composer will reach beta toward the end of this year, and the final product will ship by midyear. It is designed to work with all other Intel tools, the company says.

Even with the greatest IDEs, C and C++ have no standard way to prevent programming errors that are unique to parallel programming such as deadlocks and race conditions, and there is no single model of parallelism.

As such, Parallel Inspector, a dynamic analysis tool that is based upon Intel Thread Checker, is the company’s solution for creating code that is parallel “safe.”

Parallel Inspector instruments code and analyzes memory access to find potential data races and deadlocks, even in cases where the develop has no source code access such as DLLs and interactions with Windows, Reinders explained. Algorithms prune down results for analysis.

Customers can expect Parallel Inspector to reach beta by January 2009, and the finished product by mid-2009.

On the performance side of the testing equation, Intel Parallel Amplifier is a tool to locate multicore performance bottlenecks like unexpected serialization. It is designed for non-experts, and does not require an understanding of processor architecture or assembly code.

“[Parallel Amplifier] has visualization to show what is going on in hardware,” Reinders noted. It will follow the same development schedule as Parallel Inspector.

Parallel Studio will support Visual Studio 2008 and 2005, but has no dependencies on those versions and will work with older editions, said Reinders. C and C++ will remain Intel’s focus area for the foreseeable future, because is it commonly used to develop performance sensitive infrastructure code, and that focus area has the most to gain from parallelism now, he added.

Microsoft is independently producing libraries for the .NET framework known as Parallel FX, in addition to researching languages that are purposed for parallel development.

Related Search Term(s): parallel programming, Windows, Intel, Microsoft

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