Intel® Tools Make Threading Easier on Multiple Processors

Multithreaded Client Server Application: The Intel® compiler with support for OpenMP*, and the threading tools Intel® Thread Profiler and Intel® Thread Checker, allow you to quickly estimate the performance of threading your application on two, four, or more processors and help you specifically pinpoint places in your code where data needs to be protected in support of threading. All of these evaluations can be performed in your code with straightforward compiler-supported OpenMP pragmas.

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Introduction

Intel® Thread Profiler, Intel® Thread Checker, and the Intel® Compiler with Support for OpenMP* Allow Quick Performance Estimation for Threading Applications.

By James Rose, Intel Corp.

As a software developer wanting to take advantage of multi-core processors, you are faced with the challenge of determining whether or not threading will improve performance, be worth the effort, or even be possible.

The Intel® compiler with support for OpenMP*, and the threading tools Intel® Thread Profiler and Intel® Thread Checker, allow you to quickly estimate the performance of threading your application on two, four, or more processors and help you specifically pinpoint places in your code where data needs to be protected in support of threading. All of these evaluations can be performed in your code with straightforward compiler-supported OpenMP pragmas.

These tools can run your code in single-threaded mode and estimate how your code would run on actual multi-core or multiprocessor systems without actually threading the code in advance. This method of evaluation using OpenMP with Intel Thread Profiler and Intel Thread Checker is called "thread count independent mode," and it can be a quick and powerful technique to help estimate threading performance and implementation tradeoffs.

In addition, development of parallel code can be performed on a laptop or other computer system with fewer cores than the target system while still obtaining scalability estimates for multi-core processors for these systems. This article discusses how to use these tools to perform this analysis.