For the past several months we have been hard at work on a new training class for developers. This class teaches the main concepts of threading and scalability to C++ developers new to parallelism. If this means you, and you work in the Bay area, join us for the pilot class, which will be free. Seating is limited, so register early!

When: Friday, July 17, 2009
Where: Intel Santa Clara site, building SC12 lobby
Time: 9AM - 4PM, lunch provided

Our invite has more information including the content agenda and how to register.
Hope to see you there!

As part of the Sun Microsystems and Intel alliance, the two companies have collaborated to bring open source Threading Building Blocks (TBB) support to the Solaris Operating System (OS) and Sun Studio software toolchain. Check out the SUN Blog for additional information. Click the video below for a short interview with Deepanker Bairagi, Principal Engineer for the Sun Studio.

Software parallelism can unleash the processing power that the newer multi-core architectures provide, including the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processors. For developers, multithreading offers a software parallelism model, but many existing solutions require a lot of low-level coding. Threading Building Blocks offers a rich approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program by offering higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability.

The Solaris OS is able to take advantage of multicore architectures, including the Intel Architecture, with features such as a lightweight processes (LWPs), load-balancing across cores, and processor affinities. Sun Studio software offers a complete integrated toolchain for Solaris and Linux platforms, including parallelizing compilers, performance and thread analysis tools, memory and code debuggers, NetBeans-based Integrated Development Environment, and more.

Combined with Threading Building Blocks, developers for the Solaris platform now have a fully loaded toolbox that simplifies the development of optimized multithreaded applications for multi-core Intel processors. Click here to learn more about Threading Building Blocks and optimizing performance for multi-core processors.

Would like to hear from the community on how you see this impacting the next generation of software development for Solaris running on Intel Architecture.

I get questioned often about the difference between these terms and it can be confusing. Now that we are in the era of multi-core, let's explore common terminology. What is the difference between a processor, CPU, a chip, a core and a socket? And how is threading different?

Processor / CPU: This is what Intel makes and OEMs design into their systems.
Processors and CPUs are sometimes referred to as CHIPs
*Sockets:* The physical location on the system board where the processor/CPU goes. Sockets are increasingly used to describe a servers capability. A 4S (4 socket) server supports up to 4 CPUs inside. Sometimes this might also described as to as 4w (wayness) or 4P (processor) server.

Cores: The number physical processing units contained within the processor. There can be one, two, four or more ...
*Threads:* Some Intel processors support multi-threading technology. This is simply the ability to run more than one software thread on a core (Single threaded means one stream of software per core at a time) (Multi-threaded means more than one stream of software is executed in parallel)

So ... Processor, CPU, Socket, and Chips are terms that are often used interchangeably. Cores and Threads are both features inside the processor. Was this helpful to you ? Let me know. Chris