On the 29th and 30th of November, Intel and CERN openlab have
organised an additional workshop for CERN's specialist
programmers. This time the focus was on data-parallel
programming in C++ with Intel's new Array Building Blocks
technology and on new tools for parallelism and performance
optimisation.
The Array Building Blocks ("ArBB") session on day 1 was led by
Hans Pabst, an experienced member of the Intel Array Building
Blocks team. Array Building Blocks is a technology derived from
the Ct project at Intel, which has been a topic for research at
openlab already in 2008. Another portion of technology in ArBB
comes from RapidMind, the company which used to employ our
speaker. Hans has shown several interesting examples and
presented convenient data parallel programming schemes using
ArBB.
Day 2 was led by Levent Akyil, an Intel performance optimisation
specialist. Levent presented the newly released VTune Amplifier
2011 XE, which is a replacement for legacy VTune and Thread
Profiler tools. Currently the Amplifier is available on Windows
and Linux, and is readily installed and
at the disposal of CERN users, just like other Intel tools.
Levent has also demonstrated the usefulness of such tools in
everyday analysis, and has shared best known methods for
monitoring large software frameworks. CERN openlab has actively
participated in the pre-beta phase of Amplifier's development,
in order to ensure that CERN's software does not create the same
issues as in the case of other tools. In effect, several
participants have already successfully tested Amplifier with a
version of the CMS software - a first success of this kind for
an "out of the box" performance tool tried here at CERN.
The materials from the lab and the tools presented the first day are now
available.
Day 2 materials will be downloadable soon.
Andrzej Nowak, CERN openlab