Intel announces Intel Parallel Studio 2011, a new version of its tool set for building applications for parallel systems.
Intel
has announced a new version of its tool set for developers working to create
applications for parallel systems, Intel Parallel Studio 2011.
Bill
Savage, vice president and general manager of the Developer Products Division
of Intel's Software and Services Group, told eWEEK Intel Parallel Studio is "an
essential addition to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010."
Savage
said
Intel
Parallel Studio 2010 is a major update to the company's tools suite for
building parallel applications to run on multicore systems. Intel Parallel
Studio 2011 adds expanded threading libraries and a new threading advisor to
its set of C++ compiler, error-checking and profiling tools.
The
latest
version
of the Intel Parallel Studio features technology Intel gained from its
acquisitions of Cilk Arts and RapidMind.
New
in the 2011 edition is the Intel Parallel Advisor. Intel Parallel Advisor is a
threading design tool that identifies areas in an application that can benefit
most from parallelism, giving architects the guidance they need to transition
from serial to parallel code, Savage said. Once those opportunities have been
identified, Intel Parallel Advisor provides step-by-step recommendations for
the best way to implement parallelism and helps developers analyze potential
implementation scenarios.
"As
a Microsoft Visual Studio C++ developer for many years, and with no previous
experience with parallel programming, Intel Parallel Advisor proved to be a
major boon in making it easier and efficient to implement parallelism through
the planning and production phase," said Brian Reynolds, founder of Brian
Reynolds Research, in a statement.
"The
Intel Parallel Advisor design approach was instrumental in introducing
parallelism into our code," said William Orttung, emeritus professor of
chemistry at the University of California,
Riverside, in a statement. "The
Survey feature helped improve our code by finding areas in our serial code that
took a lot of CPU time, and where our code would benefit from parallelism."
"Intel
Parallel Advisor is an excellent tool for use in conjunction with a class on
parallel programming, enabling students to quickly comprehend the theory of
parallelism and implementation," said Korbinian Molitorisz, a researcher
at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, in a statement.
"Parallel
Advisor is the 'getting started' product for the design phase of development,"
Savage said. "The biggest problem is getting started with parallelism, and
the Parallel Advisor helps with that."
Intel
Parallel Studio addresses all phases of the development life cycle, Savage
said. The tools suite enables developers to efficiently design, build and
debug, verify, and tune parallel applications, he said.
The
product helps users design by finding threading opportunities using the Intel
Parallel Advisor threading guide. It helps developers build and debug C/C++
applications using the compilers and libraries found in Intel Parallel
Composer, which now also includes the new Intel Parallel Building Blocks, a set
of comprehensive parallel development models. Developers can verify and improve
code reliability and quality by finding crash-causing bugs using the Intel
Parallel Inspector memory and threading error checker. And developers can tune
application performance with the Intel Parallel Amplifier threading and
performance profiler.
Intel
Parallel Building Blocks (PBB) is a set of tools that gives developers new and
different ways to take advantage of parallelism with a new set of task and data
parallel models that are portable, scalable, reliable and future proof. These
models easily integrate into existing applications, preserving software and
hardware investments, Intel said.
Intel
PBB includes:
- Intel Threading Building
Blocks 3.0―This C++ template library solution provides flexible,
cross-platform parallelism solutions.
- Intel Cilk Plus―Built into
Intel C/C++ Compiler, it provides an easy-to-use, well-structured model
that simplifies parallel development, verification and analysis. And
because it's an extension to C++, programmers typically do not need to
restructure programs significantly in order to add parallelism.
- Intel Array Building Blocks
(Intel ArBB)―An API
backed by a sophisticated runtime library, Intel ArBB provides a
generalized data parallel programming solution that frees developers from
dependencies on particular low-level parallelism mechanisms or hardware
architectures. Array Building
Blocks will be available in beta in September and generally available in
early 2011.
"The
Intel TBB was surprisingly quick and simple to implement, and made the
SimulWeather SDK [Software Development Kit] really fly on the Intel Core i7
processor, with close to linear scaling," said Roderick Kennedy, principal
and founder of Simul Software, in a statement.
"We
took the best of the Cilk Arts and RapidMind acquisitions and put it into our
Parallel Building Blocks," Savage said.
Intel
Parallel Building Blocks enables developers to mix and match new parallel
models within an application to suit the developer's environment or application
and algorithms, Savage said.
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