Archive for the 'Tools' Category

June 15th 2010

Optimally use massively parallel clusters resources

We have now several petaflopic clusters available in the Top500. Of course, we are trying to get the most of their peak computational power, but I think we should sometimes also look at optimal resource allocation.

I’ve been thinking about this for several months now, for work that has thousands of tasks, each task being massively data parallel. Traditionnally, one launches a job through one’s favorite batch scheduler (favorite or mandatory…) with fixed resources and during an estimated amount of time. This may work well in research, but in the industrial world, there often a new job that arises and that needs part of your scarce resources. You may have to stop your work, loose your current advances and/or restart the job with less resources. And then the cycle goes on.

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March 31st 2010

Book review: Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach

Massively parallel processors are in the mood today. We had small parallel processors with a few cores and the ability to launch serevral threads on one core, we have now many cores on one processor and at the other end of the spectrum, we have GPUs. CPUs vendors are now going in this direction with Larabee and Fusion, and GPUs will still have more cores/threads/… It’s thus mandatory to understand this shift now.
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March 23rd 2010

Book review: Debug It!: Find, Repair, and Prevent Bugs in Your Code

Debugging software is one of the complex actions in software development. It’s not just about using a debugger, it’s about how do you manage bugs. This book has a pragmatic (amazing, don’t you think?) approach on this matter.
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January 5th 2010

Thinking of good practices when developing with accelerators

Due to the end of the free lunch, manufacturers started to provide differents processing units and developers started to go parallel. It’s kind of back to the future, as accelerators existed before today (the x87 FPU started as a coprocessor, for instance). If those accelerators were integrated into the CPU, their instruction set were also.

Today’s accelerators are not there yet. The tools are not ready yet (code translators) and usual programming practices may not be adequate. All the ecosystem will evolve, accelerators will change (GPUs are the main trend, but they will be different in a few years), so what you will do today needs to be shaped with these changes in mind. How is it possible to do so? Is it even possible?
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December 8th 2009

Book review: The Art of Concurrency: A Thread Monkey’s Guide to Writing Parallel Applications

Free lunch is over, it’s time to go concurrent. The Art of Concurrency addresses the need for a workflow to develop concurrent/parallel applications.
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November 19th 2009

Book review: Mercurial – The Definitive Guide

Thre is two ways of getting this book: the electronic one or the paper one. If you plan of using Mercurial, the paper may be better suited.

Mercurial (also called hg as the Mendeleiev symbol for mercurial) is one of the three DVCS (Distributed Version Control System) that are in the mood nowadays. Written in Python, its life started at the time as git’s when BitKepper was dumped as the Linux kernel’s VCS. Now it is a mature product, and the book tries to explain how to use it and also the differences with Git. Bazaar, the third DVCS, is not even mentionned, although it is also written in Python.
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October 6th 2009

Book Review: Pragmatic Version Control Using Git

As I was looking for a book on Bazaar (a book I didn’t find yet), I ran accross this one on Git. I heard that to use correctly Git, one needed a tutorial, so I figured a pragmatic book would do the trick.

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September 22nd 2009

Parallel Studio: Using Advisor Lite

After reviewing Parallel Studio, I’ve decided to look after Advisor Lite. Intel offers it for free, before the actual Advisor is released with a future Parallel Studio version. It aims at steering multithreaded development with Parallel Studio.
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August 20th 2009

Book review: Test-Driven Development

Test-Driven Development is one of the most controversial development processes. Instead of planning everything ahead, you develop your program incrementally as well as simultaneously and rigorously test it. Kent Beck is one of the most proeminent advocates of this method and this book is the Bible of TDD.

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August 18th 2009

Profiling with Visual Studio Performance Tool

After presenting Valgrind as an emulation profiler, I will present Microsoft solution, Visual Studio Performance Tool. It is available in the Team Suite editions, and offers a sampling- and an instrumentation-based profiler. Of course, it is embedded in Visual Studio IDE and accessible from a solution.
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