Intel® Parallel Advisor is an advanced C threading and C++ threading assistant for Microsoft Visual Studio* C/C++ developers planning to add threading to serial or parallel applications.

Providing a step-by-step proposal, Intel Parallel Advisor helps Microsoft Visual Studio* C++ developers simplify, demystify, and speed parallel application design and implementation. This C threading and C++ threading assistant also evaluates the performance and correctness of that proposal, providing insight that helps you make better design decisions before major effort has been committed.

• Simplifies transitioning serial applications to parallelism and takes parallel applications to the next level

• Enables better design decisions for feature-rich applications by analyzing parallelization proposals

• Finds and addresses conflicts such as race conditions and locks - before parallelism is applied

• The C threading and C++ threading assistant is compatible with any C/C++ application

• Smoothes development of standards-based, cross-platform solutions designed to scale for multicore and manycore

The Intel Parallel Advisor threading assistant analyzes the executing serial program as developers work through the methodology. Intel Parallel Advisor is part of Intel® Parallel Studio, the ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit for serial and parallel applications using C threading and C++ threading.

Survey
Focus on the hot call trees and loops as locations to experiment with parallelism. Developers can drill into the source code with this helpful threading assistant tool.

Benefit: Provides steps for task-oriented parallelism and targets coarse-grain parallelism.

Annotations
Insert Intel Parallel Advisor annotations into sources to describe parallel experiments. For example, you can experiment with parallelism by modeling the hot calls and loops. The survey is identified with Intel Parallel Advisor annotations.

Benefit: Allows developers to explore parallel opportunities, and analyzes outcomes.

Check Suitability
Evaluate the performance of the parallel experiment by displaying the performance projection for each parallel site and how each site's performance impacts the entire program.

Benefit: Clarifies the performance impact and implication of the parallel experiments.

Correctness
Identify data races or deadlocks errors found in the experiment. You can evaluate the data-sharing problems that prevent correct parallel execution.

Benefit: Finds and resolves conflicts (e.g., race conditions and locks) before parallelism is applied, and reduces debugging problems by defining safe and solid paths to parallelism

Summary Report
Quickly identify the parallel experiments to focus on based on projected performance gains and the number of correctness problems.

Benefit: Assesses the application and identifies where performance gains are possible.


Learn more in the Intel Parallel Advisor product brief

Check out this overview of the features that contribute to Intel Parallel Advisor being an essential threading assistant during the discovery and design phase of parallelizing existing serial programs. This tool lets the developer evaluate the return on their investment before committing to the process of parallelizing their application.

This video explains the importance of creating parallel software to take advantage of the trend toward multi-core processors and multithreading programming, explains some of the most common barriers programmers face in going parallel, and explores how Intel Parallel Advisor can overcome many of these hurdles.

Intel's Paul Petersen talks about Intel® Parallel Advisor – the threading assistant that helps programmers find the best places to inject parallelism into their code.

Intel® Engineer Bevin Brett discusses an actual application of Intel Parallel Advisor and the part the threading assistant is playing in reducing the time, cost, and discomfort of an important medical test.