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