Posted on Thursday, March 12 2009 @ 0:20 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel director and chief evangelist for software developments products James Reinders urged software makers to think more parallel in a keynote speech at the SD West conference recently. Reinders claimed developers who don't think parallel will see their career options limited, as parallel software will become increasingly important for many-core processors and Larrabee.
Reinders gave the attendees eight rules for thinking parallel from a paper he published in 2007 reports ComputerWorld. The eight rules include -- Think parallel; program using abstraction; program tasks, not threads; design with the option of turning off concurrency; avoid locks when possible; use tools and libraries designed to help with concurrency; use scalable memory; and design to scale through increased workloads.
He says that after half a decade of shipping multi-core CPUs, Intel is still struggling with how to use the available cores. The chipmaker is under increasing pressure from NVIDIA who is leveraging a network of developers to program parallel applications to run on its family of GPUs. NVIDIA and Intel are embroiled in a battle to determine if the GPU or CPU will be the heart of future computer systems.
Programming for processors with 16 or 32 cores takes a different approach according to Reinders. He said, "It's very important to make sure, if at all possible, that your program can run in a single thread with concurrency off. You shouldn't design your program so it has to have parallelism. It makes it much more difficult to debug."
More details
at DailyTech.
