Open MP vs pthreads

May 252011
 

I confess. I have an ulterior motive behind this post. Eventually I want to write a parallel programming tutorial which demonstrates the performance trade-offs in parallel programs. Since the focus of that tutorial is on performance, I prefer using the parallel programming framework with the least syntactic distractions.I think I will choose Open MP because it seems to be the cleanest alternative for parallelizing regular for-loops. This post is to familiarize readers with Open MP before the tutorial such that the tutorial can focus solely on performance optimizations.

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What makes parallel programming hard?

May 202011
 

Multi-cores are here, and they are here to stay. Industry trends show that each individual core is likely to become smaller and slower (see my post to understand the reason). Improving performance of a single program with multi-core requires that the program be split into threads that can run on multiple cores concurrently. In effect, this pushes the problem of finding parallelism in the code to the programmers. I have noticed that many hardware designers do not understand the MT challenges (since they have never written MT apps). This post is to show them the tip of this massive iceberg.
Update 5/26/2011: I have also written a case study for parallel programming which may interest you.

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