Parallel Programming with Intel® Parallel Studio XE

Chapter 10

Parallel Advisor–Driven Design

What's in This Chapter?

Using Parallel Advisor

Surveying the application

Adding annotations

Assessing suitability

Checking for correctness

Moving from annotations to parallel implementations

This chapter introduces a parallel development cycle that uses Intel Parallel Advisor. Advisor helps programmers become more productive, because it reveals the potential costs and benefits of parallelism by modeling (simulating) this behavior before programmers actually implement the parallelism in their code.

Using Parallel Advisor

The problem that Advisor helps you solve is to parallelize existing C/C++ programs to obtain parallel speedup. Advisor's value is increased productivity; it enables you to quickly and easily experiment with where to add parallelism so that the resulting program is both correct and demonstrates effective performance improvement. The experiments are performed by modeling the effect of the parallelism, without adding actual parallel constructs.

Advisor is a time-tested methodology for successfully parallelizing code, along with a set of tools to provide information about the program. Advisor has several related personas:

• A design tool that assists you in making good decisions to transform a serial algorithm to use multi-core hardware
• A parallel modeling tool that uses Advisor annotations in the serial code to calculate what might happen if that code were to execute in parallel as specified by the annotations inserted by the ...