(Click here for a larger view of Intel's Parallel Studio)Today, the vast majority of Intel processors have two or four cores, with even more on the way. Yet, as the company concedes in a FAQ released to promote Parallel Studio, few applications outside the specialized world of technical computing take any advantage of multiple cores. "There is an opportunity for Intel to help by bringing Intel's parallelism experience to more developers in the form of products to complement and extend Microsoft Visual Studio for parallelism," the company says.
Parallel Studio will be a suite of five plug-ins for
Visual Studio, designed for developers who write some or all of their software in Microsoft's Visual C++, says Intel. The plug-ins are touted as benefiting developers who want to take advantage of multicore CPUs, but who are also concerned about backward compatibility.
The plug-ins, as described by Intel, are:
- Parallel Composer, which speeds software development incorporating parallelism with a C/C++ compiler, comprehensive threaded libraries, and support for a "broad array" of programming models
- Parallel Inspector, a "proactive bug finder" that adds reliability, detecting hard-to-find threading errors in multi-threaded C/C++ Windows applications, and doing root-cause analysis for defects such as data races and deadlocks
- Parallel Amplifier, which assists in fine-tuning parallel applications for optimal performance by helping find unexpected serialization that limits scaling
- Parallel Advisor, which helps a developer understand where to add parallelism to existing source code, shows the consequences of decisions, and helps resolve any conflicts
The plug-ins can be used separately or together, says Intel. They not only require Visual Studio, but are fully interoperable with its compiler, libraries, and debugger, the company adds.
According to Intel, the Parallel Composer plug-in will support the
OpenMP 3.0 API (application programming inteface), lambda functions, auto-vectorization, spawn, and threaded libraries. A key component of Parallel Composer is said to be Intel's
Threading Building Blocks (TBB). Rev'd to version 2.1 in July,
TBB is a cross-platform, portable library that comprises a 120KB runtime combined with "template libraries" linked in at compile time, says Intel.
Addressing the difference between TBB and Parallel Composer, Intel says Parallel Composer "will cater to Windows C++ developers focused on new parallel implementations of their software using Microsoft Visual Studio. Features such as support for Linux and Mac OS, Fortran, as well as advanced levels of optimizations and optimizer controls, will remain unique to the existing compiler products."
Further informationThe Parallel Composer, Parallel Inspector, and Parallel Amplifier components of Parallel Studio will be offered via a free beta program that begins in November, and will run through May 2009, Intel says. The Parallel Advisor will enter beta "later in 2009."
To obtain the beta products as soon as they are ready, receive product information, and participate in related online forums, registration is required,
here. Qualifying for the beta requires current use of Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, not including Express editions, C/C++, and Windows XP or Vista.
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