LABS GALLERY: Intel Parallel Studio Helps Make the Most of Multiple Cores

Intel Parallel Studio installs right into Microsoft Visual Studio as a set of add-ins that include menu items and tool bars to assist in parallel coding.

The Parallel Inspector tool lets you look for deadlocks, data races and other common problems.

The results from Parallel Inspector show up in a document window inside Visual Studio. In this example, data races are found.

Clicking on an error opens up another document that gives further information about a particular error.

Parallel Amplifier runs your program and then performs an analysis to determine where the app can be tuned for multiple cores.

After Parallel Amplifier performs its analysis, it provides a detailed report of how your program runs on multiple cores. The line chart at lower right shows whether your program is making optimal use of the cores.

This line chart shows an application with poor concurrency. Such an application could be tuned to make use of multiple cores.

A typical program that could benefit from parallelization causes problems like this. Notice in CPU Usage History the left core is running at 100 percent while the right core is barely being used. A lot of software suffers from this kind of problem.