From the Editor | Main Blog Index
May 14, 2008
With few application programmers well-versed in parallel programming, and with dual- and quad-core processors spreading to all corners of the computing ecosystem, the demand for ready-to-use parallelized software is only going to get larger. That's why numerical libraries from a variety of vendors (e.g., Intel, NAG and Visual Numerics) now come with built-in parallelization.
The Mathworks is following the same path by integrating the company's Parallel Computing Toolbox with two MATLAB optimization tool sets: the Optimization Toolbox and the Genetic Algorithm and Direct Search Toolbox. Both are used to develop optimal implementations of typical MATLAB programs -- codes like engine design simulation or financial risk analysis.
The Parallel Computing Toolbox, which was originally launched as the Distributed Computing Toolbox in 2004, meets the application programmer half way to the parallel Promised Land. It extends MATLAB with new constructs such as the parallel for-loop (PARFOR), which allows the user to distribute code execution across multiple cores, multiple processors, or even a cluster. When executed on a single-core machine, PARFOR acts like a sequential for-loop. So the resulting code becomes portable across lots of different hardware setups, which not only allows you to run on different platforms, but also lets you share your software with family and friends.
The hard part is figuring out how to apply the parallel loops in the first place. By incorporating PARFOR-enabled code into the optimization solvers of the toolboxes themselves, the MathWorks engineers have done some of the heavy lifting in advance. Customers that are using the optimization solvers will automatically get the parallelized version when they pick up the next release. To get the speed-up benefit, the user just has to define the parallel resources they want to apply at execution time.
Users can explicitly switch off the built-in toolbox parallelization for a given session if they believe they can outdo the MATLAB programmers by parallelizing their own code. Theoretically, one could even mix parallelized user code with parallelized toolbox solvers, but according to Loren Dean, the director of engineering for MATLAB Products, that can be tricky.
The real goal here is to make code acceleration as transparent as possible without forcing users to sprinkle a lot of PARFORs throughout their programs. "Most of our users haven't done parallel programming yet," Dean told me. "This is a new area for them. So being able to fully leverage their multicore system or being able to leverage their cluster, without having to change their code, that's the real value for them."
Posted by Michael Feldman - May 13, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
![]()
Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.
No Recent Blog Comments
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...
Jun 19, 2013 |
Supercomputer architectures have evolved considerably over the last 20 years, particularly in the number of processors that are linked together. One aspect of HPC architecture that hasn't changed is the MPI programming model.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...
Jun 18, 2013 |
Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...
Jun 17, 2013 |
The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...
Jun 14, 2013 |
For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.