The empires of the future are the empires of the mind - Winston Churchill
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Vector Fabrics releases a tool to aid multi-threaded developers
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Vector Fabrics has released an application that it claims makes it easier for developers to code multi-threaded applications.
As chip designers such as AMD and Intel head down the multi-core route, one thing that hasn't been as forthcoming is software. Developing multithreaded applications that make use of many cores is not a simple process, requiring developers to carefully design their code. Now Vector Fabrics claims that its Vfthreaded-x86 application will allow developers to reduce both development time and risks associated with multi-threaded code.
Vector Fabric's tool is primarily aimed at high performance computing developers where squeezing every single drop of performance from a chip can result in significant reductions in workload run times. Mike Beunder, CEO of Vector Fabrics said, "Our tools make it easy to speed up a program using multiple threads, something programmers often shy away from since they find it difficult to split up code and to avoid hard-to-find bugs. Our tools largely automate this otherwise error-prone and lengthy manual parallelization process."
Vector Fabrics employs code analysis to help the developer essentially divide and conquer. There's also code benchmarking to show the level of resources a program is using and whether optimisations in certain areas could speed up execution.
Whereas a few years back this sort of application would be available to run on the developer's workstation or build box, Vector Fabrics provides Vfthreaded-x86 as a cloud based application running on Amazon's EC2.
Helping developers produce multi-threaded code is of utmost importance if chip vendors are to highlight the performance benefits of attaching ever more cores to their processors. The ability for developers to easily get information on how to optimise code is only likely to help that. µ
Tags: Software
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True of proprietary software, not of Free Software. It’s very hard to maintain proprietary software across multiple architectures (look at the failure of multi-architecture Windows NT), much easier for Free Software. That’s why I’ve been able to run a 64-bit Linux system with full 64-bit drivers and full 64-bit apps for about the last 5 years.
I don't think software has lagged all that much. The main software I have been around that actually needs to be updated for 64-bit processing has been - 3DstudioMax and SolidWorks for example. Most office oriented software like excel and word don't need an update immediately. It makes no sense to have a document bigger than 2GB because you couldn't send it to anyone. In my opinion the biggest area where it is lagging is in games. Many games could benefit from an address space of more than 2GB. Just last night my racing game of choice crashed because it tried to load more than 2GB of data and XP doesn't like that. Yes, I still use XP because W7 gets in my way too much. My next gaming box will definitely run W7x64 though but that won't be until a 64-bit version of my game is out.
As for multi-threading - I don't think it's all that tough to do. I've been doing it for more than fifteen years - ever since windoze NT came out with SMP support and the pentium pro was released. Once you figure out the locking mechanisms and make sure your code is reentrant it's really pretty easy I think.
In my experience software has lagged way behind CPU advancement. Many 32-bit apps have never even been upgraded to 64-bit let alone designed for multi-core CPUs. A lot of system performance could be gained with quality software.
If for free...