HPCwire: Making 'Parallel Programming' Synonymous with 'Programming'

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March 21, 2008

Making 'Parallel Programming' Synonymous with 'Programming'

-- Intel and Microsoft Fund Academic Experts to Transform Mainstream Programming

by John E. West, for HPCwire

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This week Intel and Microsoft announced their intention to fund two new university-based research centers focused on transforming the way programmers make use of multicore chips, and in the process enabling a whole new class of applications. The companies are optimistic that this effort will form the core of a radical transformation in the ways we use technology. All of this goodness will come from new ways to do something we've been focused on for the past 40 years: coercing more than one processing unit to work together to accomplish a single task.

The goal of the effort is to focus leading academic teams on the problem of effectively programming multicore processors. The research will focus on applications, architecture, and operating systems software as well as the software support infrastructure (compilers, languages, and so on) needed to express parallel work. An interesting aspect of this particular effort is that it brings together the leading hardware and software platforms in the market to look at the total solution.

In an interview with HPCwire Katherine Yelick, one of the principal investigators on the university team from UC Berkeley, said of the relationship, "This is one of the first times in my career when it actually feels like the major processor manufacturers might actually listen to people in terms of what they would like to make it easier to write parallel programs, or easier to get performance out of them."

As HPCwire readers you are probably focused on high performance technical computing, and possibly use, provision, or build computers with at least hundreds of sockets. The principals in this project were careful to emphasize that HPTC is not the focus of this effort, and you should not expect MPI 3.0 to rise out of one of the centers. The focus is on mainstream computing and applications. In fact that word, "mainstream," is repeated again and again in the official releases on the project.

The mainstream focus puts the emphasis on single-socket parallel programming. As Andrew Chien, vice president of the Corporate Technology Group and the director of Intel Research, said during the teleconference "a lot of the focus around how you deliver the promise of parallelism to a broad array of platforms in everything from servers down to laptops and small mobile devices is a lot about single socket parallelism, and that really is the primary focus of the UPCRC program."

I would expect that the research developed by these centers will spur advancements in HPTC -- after all, we're all using the same chips, and some of the issues one faces in coordinating work among 100 cores on a single chip come up again when you connect 100 such chips together. In response to a question asked by the Seattle Post Intelligencer on Tuesday about who would own intellectual property rights to the products of research from the two universities, both Microsoft and Intel emphasized their commitment to open-sourcing the results, so the HPTC community should have access to a lot of this research as it develops.

The plan announced on Tuesday will devote $10 million from Intel and Microsoft to each of two Universal Parallel Computer Research Centers (UPCRC); a total investment of $20 million over 5 years. The centers were selected out of a pool of 25 universities in a competitive process, and both awardees have a long history of IT innovation.

The first center, to be housed at the University of California at Berkeley, will be headed up by David Patterson, one of the authors of The Landscape of Parallel Computing: A View from Berkeley, and one of the pioneers of RISC and RAID. The second center will be led by Marc Snir and Wen-mei W. Hwu at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Snir is former head of the department of computer science at UIUC and leader/initiator of the IBM Blue Gene project while at TJ Watson before that. Hwu is the current chair of ECE at UIUC and director of the OpenIMPACT project. Both universities are adding their own funds to the effort, with UIUC chipping in $8 million. UC Berkeley has applied for $7 million from the state of California.

Yelick outlined the focus of the UC center along software, architecture, operating systems, and correctness problems. The software work is focused in two different layers, "...what we call the productivity layer, which we think is for most programmers to use, and an efficiency layer, which is for the parallelism and performance experts." The productivity layer will use abstractions to hide much of the complexity of parallel programming, while the efficiency layer will let experts get at the details for maximum performance. During the teleconference Patterson broke these two audiences more colorfully into the "programming masses" and "ninja programmers."

Snir indicated that the software portion of the UIUC center's focus will be much more on the programming masses. As he put it during the teleconference, the goal for this effort is to "make 'parallel programming' synonymous with 'programming'."

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