Software Developers Need to Think Parallel Says Intel

From DailyTech: Multi-core processors have been in the consumer market for several years now. However, despite having access to CPUs with two, three, four, and more cores, there are still relatively few applications available that can take advantage of multiple cores. Intel is hoping to change that and is urging developers of software to think parallel.

Intel director and chief evangelist for software development products talked about thinking parallel in a keynote speech he delivered at the SD West conference recently. James Reinders said, "One of the phrases I've used in some talks is, it's time for us as software developers to really figure out how to think parallel." He also says that the developer who doesn’t think parallel will see their career options limited.

Reinders gave the attendees eight rules for thinking parallel from a paper he published in 2007 reports ComputerWorld. The eight rules include -- Think parallel; program using abstraction; program tasks, not threads; design with the option of turning off concurrency; avoid locks when possible; use tools and libraries designed to help with concurrency; use scalable memory; and design to scale through increased workloads.

He says that after half a decade of shipping multi-core CPUs, Intel is still struggling with how to use the available cores. The chipmaker is under increasing pressure from NVIDIA who is leveraging a network of developers to program parallel applications to run on its family of GPUs. NVIDIA and Intel are embroiled in a battle to determine if the GPU or CPU will be the heart of future computer systems.

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