The Server Room Blog

Coding Scalable or Parallel Applications – It Is Not As Hard You Think

wesley.e.shimanek@intel.com — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:54:49 GMT

The need to write scalable applications has been important for programmers in the HPC community for years. Now, with the proliferation of multi/many-core processors developing scalable software is now a top priority for many programmers.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum stated at the USENIX ’08 conference last year that developing “sequential programming is really hard” … the difficulty is “parallel programming is a step beyond that.”

He is right, but let’s illustrate why it is just a small step.

Here is the point – parallel architectures will continue proliferating and we will need to develop and refine parallel algorithms that exploit parallelism. While difficult, to develop and refine parallel algorithms, the actual programming of these new algorithms, does not need to be hard. However, if the developer is required to know the intimate details of the hardware then the development and refinement parallel algorithms can be very difficult, and very time consuming.

One approach provided by Intel software developer tools is to abstract away the details of the hardware. This allows the developer to focus on their algorithms /applications, and rely on Intel software developer tools to provide the best optimizations for current and future platform While you may give up some performance by being abstracted away, what you lose in performance will be rewarded by your ability to quickly iterate through more iteration of your parallelization ideas in less time. You may find yourself designing and developing better approaches to parallelism because you were able to test more hypotheses.

An additional by-product of being abstracted away from having to know the intricacies of the hardware is that your software will be highly adaptable to future platforms. You will see tremendous improvements on multi-core solutions and will be in a great position scale your application performance forward as newer architectures are made available.

To learn more Intel Software Tools and the benefits of optimizing your software on multi core based solutions first visit http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-sdp-home/

Skate to where the puck is going to be: Energy Efficient Performance

dave.r.hill@intel.com — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:23:41 GMT

Only a few years ago, customers seldom considered server energy efficiency when buying servers. Today, server energy efficiency is often one of the key purchase criteria. And for some customers, energy efficient performance is the #1 criteria. Going forward in time, it is expected that the majority of people will use energy efficient performance (sometimes referred to as performance/watt) when evaluating servers.

From a customer point of view, the request is simple: "I want both high performance and reduced power consumption…at the same time." From a product design viewpoint, the "opportunity" to reduce power while still improving performance comes with some unique tradeoffs that are often complex. How much performance is needed? How much can/should power consumption be reduced? If power consumption is reduced, what impact will that have on performance? Etc, etc.

Processor design cycles are quite long and are started many years before a product actually comes to market. Because of the long design cycle, there is comprehensive process at the beginning to determine product features based on expected market needs. At the time the Nehalem architecture was being developed, customers were just starting to evaluate servers based energy efficient performance, but the Nehalem processor design team decided to make energy efficiency a fundamental "feature" of the processor. The good news is the team correctly predicted the market requirements with the upcoming Intel® Xeon® 5500 Processors (aka. Nehalem). Servers based on Nehalem processors are expected to provide customers with exactly what they have been requesting…"knock your socks off" performance along with reduced power consumption.

As Wayne Gretzky once famously said: “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” With Nehalem, Intel is definitely skating to where the puck will be.

"Oracle OpenWorld08: XEON7400 on Sunfire X4450"

william.h.lea@intel.com — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 05:00:19 GMT

I ran into Barry Kittner (Intel) and Marcos Peixoto (Sun) at the Oracle OpenWorld event in San Francisco today. Sun is showing the Sunfire X4450, 4-Socket, 2U Rack Server. Sun is also talking about a unique way to evaluate the Sunfire server, check out this video to find how...

What do you think, not a bad deal is it? Check out this link for more details: TryAndBuy

“VMWorld08: Intel Keynote-Collaboration for Leading Virtualization Deployments”

william.h.lea@intel.com — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:28:49 GMT

More news from VMWorld 2008, Las Vegas. Doug Fisher, Intel V.P. gave a keynote during the VMWorld conference. One of the more interesting elements brought Steve Herrod, Sr. V.P. and CTO of VMware on stage to talk about how Intel and VMware are collaborating to deliver leading Virtualization Deployments. Click on the video to see what they have to say.....