Financial Services Industry Community

11 Keys to Mastering Multicore App Development

Boost Your Skills with Intel's new Guide for Developing Multithreaded Applications
If you're coding for multicore, you shoot for maximum performance but hit barriers along the way. Arm yourself with the latest development and optimization tips from the experts. Download the Intel® Guide for Developing Multithreaded Applications Part One.

Part 1 of this technical guide focuses on application threading and synchronization techniques. A compilation of 11 top articles, it features examples and how to's on measuring performance, removing artificial dependencies, using tasks instead of threads, mitigating synchronization impacts, and more. Here's just a sampling of the articles inside:

• Loop Modifications to Enhance Data-Parallel Performance—Tackle loop challenges with techniques that minimize synchronization and make parallelization easier—such as loop fusion, loop interchange, and loop unrolling.
• Load Balance and Parallel Performance—Avoid common memory and I/O pitfalls to achieve the perfect load balance by sharing workloads equally across all threads.
• Managing Lock Contention: Large and Small Critical Sections - Efficient parallel code balances thread performance in critical sections and manages idle time of other threads. Learn the concept of critical section size and see when it is best to use large or small critical sections.

Watch for Part 2 of this Guide next week for ten additional articles on varied memory management approaches for multicore and the latest programming tools to streamline parallel programming.

Featured Articles & News

Bridging the Gap from the SerialPast to the Parallel Present
Intel® Software Partner Corensic Jinx* is a software quality tool that augments your existing development processes and tools to systematically locate concurrency bugs in parallel software.

Top 10 Reasons Why Nehalem is Ideal for the Cloud
On March 30, 2009 Intel officially launched the Intel® Xeon® 5500 processor (formerly codenamed “Nehalem”) for servers and workstations. One of the most exciting uses of this new platform will be as a key building block in cloud computing infrastructure. Whether you’ve bought into the hype of cloud computing or are a jaded IT realist – you can’t afford to pass up this list of 10 reasons the Intel Xeon 5500 processor is perfect for the cloud.

Using Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer Events/ Ratios & Optimizing Applications
The Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer provides an interface to monitor performance of the processor and gain insights into possible performance bottlenecks. In this document, we will illustrate some code samples and measure VTune™ events & ratios for monitoring processor performance.

High Performance Computing with Binomial Option Pricing, Part 1
Derivative pricing lies at the center of modern quantitative finance, and stock-option pricing is its most fundamental form. The binomial option pricing model has found wide applications in both in equity and in fixed income derivatives pricing. This paper present a software optimization methodology that accelerates any derivative pricing application based on the binomial tree option pricing model.

Writing High Performance .NET Code
Review of the core performance related issues that one should be aware of in .NET and some common mistakes which one should avoid and many tips for writing high performance .NET code.

Developer Survey Shows Performance Requirements Usher In the Multi-Core Era
Application Developers, Architects Share Perspectives on Critical Issues As Industry Shifts to Parallel Computing

Sun To Focus on Latency In Trading Applications Developer Workshop
Sun Microsystems is running a “Trading Applications Developer Workshop” on Thursday, November 20th, at its City of London customer briefing centre. The workshop - with an emphasis on latency - runs from 9am to Noon, followed by lunch, and is free to qualified registrants. Click here to register. Attendance is limited so register today.

The Sun JVM™ delivers highly optimized performance on Intel® architecture, right out of the box.
The ongoing collaboration between Intel and Sun has resulted in a high level of optimizations made to the Sun JVM specifically for the Intel® Xeon® processor. Developers can obtain excellent Java performance simply from this choice of hardware and JVM, even before taking any specific tuning steps.

Tuning, Optimization, Benchmarking Strategies
by Rick Carlin
Thoughts on performance methodologies for the financial services community.

SOA? ESB? What is all this?
by Mahesh Bhat
An overview and lessons from the field on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Server Bus (ESB).

Building Financial Numerical Recipes with Intel Compilers
by Shuo Li
Financial Numerical Recipes is a collection of public C++ subroutines Professor Bernt Arne Ødegaard at the Norwegian School of Management wrote for general reference. Learn how to build these packages with GCC, Intel® Compiler and IT++.

On March 30, 2009 Intel officially launched the Intel® Xeon® 5500 processor (formerly codenamed “Nehalem”) for servers and workstations. One of the most exciting uses of this new platform will be as a key building block in cloud computing infrastructure. Whether you’ve bought into the hype of cloud computing or are a jaded IT realist – you can’t afford to pass up this list of 10 reasons the Intel Xeon 5500 processor is perfect for the cloud.

The Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer provides an interface to monitor performance of the processor and gain insights into possible performance bottlenecks. In this document, we will illustrate some code samples and measure VTune™ events & ratios for monitoring processor performance.

Intel® Tools Special Promotion

The Developer Products Division at Intel is pleased to provide a 10% discount on Intel® Tools for financial customers. This includes:

• Intel® C++ and Fortran Compilers
• Intel® Performance Libraries
• Intel® Threading Analysis Tools
• Intel® VTune™ Performance Analyzer
• Intel® Cluster Tools

For questions or tools purchases, please contact intel.tools.finance@intel.com

Videos

Watch episode 94 of Parallel Programming Talk featuring SunGard Software Development Manager, Jiaping Zhang. Hear how SunGard was able to scale their Ambit BancWare Asset and Liability Management (ALM) application to 1024 cores and demonstrate near-linear scalability.

Also, watch episode 86 of Parallel Programming Talk featuring SunGard Chief Technology Officer, Don Tyson, discuss SunGard's intelliMATCH application optimization effort. A dramatic reduction in transaction reconciliation time was achieved by taking advantage of parallel processing.

(SunGard, #380 on the Fortune 500, provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector.)

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Intel Premier IT Professional - Financial Services

News, technical papers, resources and helpful links for the IT Professionals in the Financial Services Industry.