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Intel addresses development life cycle with Parallel Studio

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May 26, 2009 — 
Intel is "solidly convinced" that its Parallel Studio development suite will enable organizations to deliver parallel programs on schedule by addressing the development life cycle of a parallel program, said James Reinders, chief product evangelist and director of marketing for Intel’s software development products division.

Parallel Studio became generally available today. It consists of Parallel Advisor, Parallel Composer, Parallel Inspector and Parallel Amplifier, as well as compilers and libraries for C and C++ programs.

Most significantly, said Reinders, the suite helps developers root out errors in deterministic programs, a style of programming where instructions are carried out consistently every time a program is executed, he explained.

Determinism helps avoid conflicts when the components of a parallel program are running concurrently, such as data race conditions and deadlocks—types of data processing errors that can cause programs to crash and lose data.  

Intel Parallel Advisor provides analysis for Parallel Studio. It examines existing source code to advise developers about where they can apply parallel programming to their program. It also makes recommendations on how to implement the threads, and it identifies potential conflicts and ways resolve them.

"We don't want people to think that the compiler solves the problem of moving to parallelism," said Reinders. "It requires an architect to think about introducing parallelism into a program. They prototype, try it out…It may or may not be a dead end, and could take weeks or months."

Parallel Advisor accelerates that process, eliminating the need for prototyping, he explained. It selects places where parallelism can be added to a program, and it models to determine whether the code will scale, he said.

A beta of Parallel Advisor is shipping with Parallel Studio, and the final edition will be delivered before the end of the year.

Parallel Composer provides a compiler and libraries for parallel development in Microsoft Visual Studio. APIs and components, including the OpenMP 3.0 API specification, Intel Threading Building Blocks, and Intel Integrated Performance Primitives, raise the level of abstraction away from low-level thread management.

Parallel Inspector is a dynamic analysis tool that is based upon Intel Thread Checker, the company’s solution for creating code that is "parallel safe." Parallel Inspector instruments code to analyze memory access in order to locate interleaving errors.

Lastly, Intel Parallel Amplifier is a tool used to locate multicore performance bottlenecks, such as unexpected serialization. It is designed for non-experts and does not require an understanding of processor architecture or assembly code.

"Many memory checks don't work in multi-threaded programs," said Reinders. "Parallel Studio [beta] customers ran Parallel Studio and found errors that were not detected with other tools, or in multi-threaded programs that they were unable to do checking on."

Future editions of Parallel Studio will integrate with Eclipse and Apple Xcode, but Intel has not announced its timetable for Parallel Studio. Intel's Ct technology, a data parallelism library for standard C and C++ compilers, will also be bundled.


Related Search Term(s): Intel, multicore


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