Multithreading Consistency Guide

The objective of the Multithreading Consistency Guide is to provide guidelines for developing efficient multithreaded applications across Intel-based symmetric multiprocessors (SMP) and/or systems with Hyper-Threading Technology. An application developer can use the advice in this document to improve multithreading performance and minimize unexpected performance variations on current as well as future SMP architectures built with Intel® processors. The first version of the Guide provides general advice on multithreaded performance. Hardware-specific optimizations have deliberately been kept to a minimum. In future versions of the Guide, topics covering hardware-specific optimizations will be added for developers willing to sacrifice portability for higher performance.

Readers should have programming experience in a high-level language, preferably C, C++, and/or Fortran, though many of the recommendations in this document also apply to languages such as Java, C#, and Perl. Readers must also understand basic concurrent programming and be familiar with one or more threading methods, preferably OpenMP*, POSIX threads (also referred to as Pthreads), or the Win32* threading API.

The main objective of the Guide is to provide a quick reference to design and optimization guidelines for multithreaded applications on Intel® platforms. This Guide is not intended to serve as a textbook on multithreading nor is it a porting guide to Intel platforms.

Intel software development products enable developers to rapidly thread their applications, assist in debugging, and tune multithreaded performance on Intel processors. The product suite supports multiple threading methods, listed here in increasing order of complexity – automatic parallelization, compiler-directed threading with OpenMP, and manual threading using standard libraries such as Pthreads and the Win32 threading API.

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