Develop and Solve: Threading for Multi-Core Solutions

It has been extensively written that the “free lunch is over” when it comes to software running fast as new accelerated hardware is introduced. From now on it is up to the software developers to make sure that they have built concurrency into their applications to take advantage of multi-core processors. 

The Intel Software Network offers a wide range of information for Optimizing Software for improved performance on the Intel® Core™ 2 processor family as well as more general information on getting started with threading your first application. Please review the list below to find the technical information, code sample or software development tool that meets the needs of your project scope.

• Digital Home / Consumer and Office / Business Client Applications
  • Threading Basics for Games
  • Multithreaded Rendering Simulation
• Digital Enterprise / Enterprise Server Applications
  • Enterprise Threading for Multi-Core
  • Automated MPI Correctness Checking - What if there was a magic option?
  • Which Synchronization Primitives Should you use? Atomic, Lock, Critical?

If your company is looking to implement one or more threading optimizations to one or more modules within your application that demonstrate improved performance scaling on the Intel® Core™ 2 processor family, then we suggest that you start with these articles.

• Multithreaded Programming Quickstart*
• Scaling Software Architectures for Multi-Core Computing
• Multithreaded Technology and Multi-Core Processors
• Measuring Application Performance on Multi-core Hardware
• Intel® Multi-Core Processor Architecture: FAQ
• Recommended Books on Parallel Programming and Application Threading

• Run on Intel® Graphics at resolution and frame rate for acceptable usability (1024x768 at 30fps or better)
  • Tools and Tips for Debugging Issues on Intel® 3000 and X3000 Series Graphics
  • Video Gross Error Detection
• Run without graphics corruption or rendering artifacts
  • Quick Reference Guide to Intel Integrated Graphics
  • Intel® GMA 3000 and X3000 Developer's Guide
  • Speeding up a Video Encoding Routine
  • Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP) and Media Apps (video)
  • New Ray-Tracing/Rendering Functions in IPP!
    
• Enumerate and allow end users to select destination audio device, if forcing use of a default device
• Intel HD Audio should be included in the list of support audio interfaces supported
• Intel Graphics should be included in the supported graphics adapters list, if any

For More Information on Intel Graphics optimizations, see the Graphics Developer Community.

Notebook/Laptop PC is a rapidly growing segment which is bringing anywhere, anytime computing and connecting capability to the users. To improve the mobile computing experience, take advantage of one or more of these features:

When it comes to threading software, developers have many options and threading techniques such as Pthreads, WinThreads, OpenMP or Intel Threading Building Blocks.

• Writing parallel programs: a multi-language tutorial introduction
• Threading Models for High-Performance Computing: Pthreads or OpenMP*?
• Intel® Threading Building Blocks, OpenMP, or native threads?
• Threading in .NET* - Best Practices (1 of 7 Series)
• Supercharge Java* Applications on Multi-Core Servers

Essential Tools for Threading

• Intel® Thread Checker for Windows*
• Intel® Thread Profiler for Windows / Intel® Thread Checker for Linux*
• Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) for Windows*, Linux*, and Mac OS* X
  

Intel® Software Development Products

• Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer
• Intel® Compilers
• Intel® Math Kernel Library (Intel® MKL)
• Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP)

• List of Books on parallel programming and multi-core software development.
• Complete list of Multi-Core technical papers.
• Still don't see what you need. Post a question to the "Threading on Intel Parallel Architectures" forum.

For more complete information about compiler optimizations, see our Optimization Notice.

Comments (2)

June 26, 2010 12:02 PM PDT Peerasak Wangsom Total Points: 295 Green Belt

Here are the great tools and the powerful resources for novice parallel programmer and academic student.

September 25, 2010 3:22 PM PDT Rishi Saxena Total Points: 5 Registered User

A very detailed article on Threading and explained very nicely.

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