Programming Many Core Chips

This book presents new concepts, techniques and promising programming models for designing software for chips with "many" (hundreds to thousands) processor cores. Given the scale of parallelism inherent to these chips, software designers face new challenges in terms of operating systems, middleware and applications. This will serve as an invaluable, single-source reference to the state-of-the-art in programming many-core chips. Coverage includes many-core architectures, operating systems, middleware, and programming models.

Multi-core chips from Intel and AMD offer a dramatic boost in speed and responsiveness, and plenty of opportunities for multiprocessing on ordinary desktop computers. But they also present a challenge: More than ever, multithreading is a requirement for good performance. This guide explains how to maximize the benefits of these processors through a portable C++ library that works on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Unix systems. With it, you'll learn how to use Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) effectively for parallel programming -- without having to be a threading expert. Written by James Reinders, Chief Evangelist of Intel Software Products, and based on the experience of Intel's developers and customers, this book explains the key tasks in multithreading and how to accomplish them with TBB in a portable and robust manner. With plenty of examples and full reference material, the book lays out common patterns of uses, reveals the gotchas in TBB, and gives important guidelines for choosing among alternatives in order to get the best performance. You'll learn how Intel Threading Building Blocks: Enables you to specify tasks instead of threads for better portability, easier programming, more understandable source code, and better performance and scalability in general Focuses on the goal of parallelizing computationally intensive work to deliver high-level solutions Is compatible with other threading packages, and doesn't force you to pick one package for your entire program Emphasizes scalable, data-parallel programming, which allows program performance to increase as you add processors Relies on generic programming, which enables you to write the best possible algorithms with the fewest constraints Any C++ programmer who wants to write an application to run on a multi-core system will benefit from this book. TBB is also very approachable for a C programmer or a C++ programmer without much experience with templates. Best of all, you don't need experience with parallel programming or multi-core processors to use this book.

Programming multi-core and many-core computing systems Sabri Pllana, Linnaeus University, Sweden Fatos Xhafa, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain Provides state-of-the-art methods for programming multi-core and many-core systems The book comprises a selection of twenty two chapters covering: fundamental techniques and algorithms; programming approaches; methodologies and frameworks; scheduling and management; testing and evaluation methodologies; and case studies for programming multi-core and many-core systems. Program development for multi-core processors, especially for heterogeneous multi-core processors, is significantly more complex than for single-core processors. However, programmers have been traditionally trained for the development of sequential programs, and only a small percentage of them have experience with parallel programming. In the past, only a relatively small group of programmers interested in High Performance Computing (HPC) was concerned with the parallel programming issues, but the situation has changed dramatically with the appearance of multi-core processors on commonly used computing systems. It is expected that with the pervasiveness of multi-core processors, parallel programming will become mainstream. The pervasiveness of multi-core processors affects a large spectrum of systems, from embedded and general-purpose, to high-end computing systems. This book assists programmers in mastering the efficient programming of multi-core systems, which is of paramount importance for the software-intensive industry towards a more effective product-development cycle. Key features: Lessons, challenges, and roadmaps ahead. Contains real world examples and case studies. Helps programmers in mastering the efficient programming of multi-core and many-core systems. The book serves as a reference for a larger audience of practitioners, young researchers and graduate level students. A basic level of programming knowledge is required to use this book.

As Moore’s law continues to unfold, two important trends have recently emerged. First, the growth of chip capacity is translated into a corresponding increase of number of cores. Second, the parallelization of the computation and 3D integration technologies lead to distributed memory architectures. This book describes recent research that addresses urgent challenges in many-core architectures and application mapping. It addresses the architectural design of many core chips, memory and data management, power management, design and programming methodologies. It also describes how new techniques have been applied in various industrial case studies.

The purpose of this book is to evaluate strategies for future system design in multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) architectures. Both hardware design and integration of new development tools will be discussed. Novel trends in MPSoC design, combined with reconfigurable architectures are a main topic of concern. The main emphasis is on architectures, design-flow, tool-development, applications and system design.

Although the highly anticipated petascale computers of the near future will perform at an order of magnitude faster than today’s quickest supercomputer, the scaling up of algorithms and applications for this class of computers remains a tough challenge. From scalable algorithm design for massive concurrency toperformance analyses and scientific visualization, Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications captures the state of the art in high-performance computing algorithms and applications. Featuring contributions from the world’s leading experts in computational science, this edited collection explores the use of petascale computers for solving the most difficult scientific and engineering problems of the current century. Covering a wide range of important topics, the book illustrates how petascale computing can be applied to space and Earth science missions, biological systems, weather prediction, climate science, disasters, black holes, and gamma ray bursts. It details the simulation of multiphysics, cosmological evolution, molecular dynamics, and biomolecules. The book also discusses computational aspects that include the Uintah framework, Enzo code, multithreaded algorithms, petaflops, performance analysis tools, multilevel finite element solvers, finite element code development, Charm++, and the Cactus framework. Supplying petascale tools, programming methodologies, and an eight-page color insert, this volume addresses the challenging problems of developing application codes that can take advantage of the architectural features of the new petascale systems in advance of their first deployment.

In continuation of a successful series of events, the 4th Many-core Applications Research Community (MARC) symposium took place at the HPI in Potsdam on December 8th and 9th 2011. Over 60 researchers from different fields presented their work on many-core hardware architectures, their programming models, and the resulting research questions for the upcoming generation of heterogeneous parallel systems.

Programming multi-core and many-core computing systems Sabri Pllana, Linnaeus University, Sweden Fatos Xhafa, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain Provides state-of-the-art methods for programming multi-core and many-core systems The book comprises a selection of twenty two chapters covering: fundamental techniques and algorithms; programming approaches; methodologies and frameworks; scheduling and management; testing and evaluation methodologies; and case studies for programming multi-core and many-core systems. Program development for multi-core processors, especially for heterogeneous multi-core processors, is significantly more complex than for single-core processors. However, programmers have been traditionally trained for the development of sequential programs, and only a small percentage of them have experience with parallel programming. In the past, only a relatively small group of programmers interested in High Performance Computing (HPC) was concerned with the parallel programming issues, but the situation has changed dramatically with the appearance of multi-core processors on commonly used computing systems. It is expected that with the pervasiveness of multi-core processors, parallel programming will become mainstream. The pervasiveness of multi-core processors affects a large spectrum of systems, from embedded and general-purpose, to high-end computing systems. This book assists programmers in mastering the efficient programming of multi-core systems, which is of paramount importance for the software-intensive industry towards a more effective product-development cycle. Key features: Lessons, challenges, and roadmaps ahead. Contains real world examples and case studies. Helps programmers in mastering the efficient programming of multi-core and many-core systems. The book serves as a reference for a larger audience of practitioners, young researchers and graduate level students. A basic level of programming knowledge is required to use this book.