KludgeHack

The need to Change the Way we Program

Now a days companies like Intel and AMD, responsible for almost every desktop computer processor, are facing a new challenge.

As processors speed are now becoming impossible to improve, chip makers start to build ever increasing multi-core systems. From dual (2), quad (4) to hundreds of cores, this recent new type of processors is here to stay. Programmer have to start giving it some attention.

A big percentage of software, from Operative Systems to Commercial Applications, still don’t benefit from parallelism properly.

Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said recently: “The software has to also start following Moore’s law, Software has to double the amount of parallelism that it can support every two years.”.

Amdahl’s Law, a principle that holds that there is only so much parallelism that programs can incorporate before they hit some inherently serial task, is going to be a challenge most software companies will have to face.

Microsoft already acknowledge: “We do now face the challenge of figuring out how to move, I’ll say, the whole programming ecosystem of personal computing up to a new level where they can reliably construct large-scale applications that are distributed, highly concurrent, and able to utilize all this computing power, that is probably the single most disruptive thing that we will have done in the last 20 or 30 years.”.

Microsoft is already planning its next Windows to handle the amount of processing cores that will become standard in a near future.

Programmers should start to use more, and benefit, from threading. Although almost every language supports this paradigm, Intel released several months ago some tools (Windows and Linux) to help in this matter:

• Intel Threading Building Blocks – C++ Extension to ease the process of writing parallel routines, or threads, within an application
• Intel Thread Checker – reduces time to market for threaded applications by speeding up the development process.
• Thread Profiler – helps you understand the structure of threaded applications and maximize their performance.

Its up to the programmer to learn, change and benefit from it.

 ”For every software (company) that doesn’t buy this, there is another that will look at it as an opportunity,” Borkar said.