Welcome to Show 70 of Parallel Programming Talk that was originally broadcast on March 30th.
On this episode Clay and Aaron talked with Intel Marketing Manager Darren Yee about Thread Optimization for the Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition Processor.
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First The News:
Intel Guide for Developing Multi-Threaded Applications was published on
March 9, 2010. Key sections on of The Guide include; Application Threading, Synchronization, Memory Management and Programming Tools. We look forward to your thoughts and feedback and encourage you to participate in the discussion and ask question in our Threading on Intel® Parallel Architectures forum.
Congratulations to Microsoft who Launched Visual Studio 2010 on April 12th.
Our very own James Reinders wrote up a blog post about the new tool and how compements Intel strategy for parallelism.
Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC) Illinois Research Seminar
Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 4:00 PM (Central Time)
Adding Parallelism with Intel® Parallel Studio: No Parallelism Experience Required
by Mark Davis, Sr., Principal Engineer, Intel
The 5th annual Multicore Expo is April 26-29th in San Jose CA. It will be co-located with ESC Silicon Valley and will provide Multicore Expo attendees with 3 days of dedicated multicore technology training options and multicore-related exhibits.
Three Webinars About Multicore Parallelism - May 12, 19 & 26th.
James Reinders will be talking with fellow industry leaders and innovators Herb Sutter, Steve Teixeira & David Mackay. Learn the very latest about how to bring threading to robust Windows* applications and pull more from multicore platforms.
UPCRC Illinois Summer School to be held July 19-23, 2010 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prerequisites for the summer school include solid programming experience (C, C++, C# or Java languages) and a demonstrated interest in applying multicore programming to academic or professional pursuits.
If you have questions you'd like to see up discuss, ideas for show topics or just want to send fan mail.... Send Email to parallelprogrammingtalk@intel.com
On Today's Show:
Two demos of Thread Optimization on the new Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition Processor with Intel Marketing Manager Darren Yee.
The first is a showcase of photo realistic rendering with Maxon. In addition to running the ray traced rendering on the new Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition Processor the Intel Engineering team worked with Maxon to improve the threading model by increasing the granularity of work units.
As will all demos, render performance will vary by scene depending on complexity and other factors. The bike scene used for this demo is pretty simple. When you look at a variety of scenes the new render method will win out. Although the results look similar (because the bike scene is relatively simple) the new engine is doing a lot more processing than the old one, which is another reason why the new engine appears slower in this case. When processing more complex scenes you’d be able to see a difference in quality as a result of the extra processing.
In working with Maxon the team utilized Intel Thread Profiler, Intel Thread Checker, the new Intel Compiler 11.1., Intel VTune and Intel Parallel Studio.
The other demonstration that Darren presented was Napoleon:Total War. Darren discussed how the Napoleon:Total War team was able to utilize additional processing power to present the gamer with more life like scenes and character movement.
Our Next Parallel Programming Talk will be Tuesday at 8:00AM PT.
And remember, let's be thread safe out there.