We at Rogue Wave are very aware of what we have termed the multi-core dilemma.  The problem is simple:  multi-core chips require software concurrency to take advantage of the full processing power.  The solution can be very challenging, however, requiring developers to introduce threading or multi-process code into their applications.  We have been promoting the ability to achieve parallelism at a service level within our Hydra product line, but within SourcePro we have until now only provided a threading abstraction layer that still requires significant application refactoring if not used initially.

To help improve the ability for our customers to take advantage of multi-core architectures, we are currently investigating ways to introduce parallelism within some of our current SourcePro classes.  The easiest area to add parallelism “under the hood”, so to speak, is in areas where there is read-only access occuring.  For these cases, we maintain safety in performing parallel operations that hopefully would require no code changes for our customers.

To ensure that introducing parallelism where it previously didn’t exist will not cause issues with existing use of the products, we are looking to make activation of the parallel code occur from a switch type mechanism.  We could provide a new build flag, an environment variable or other options to allow the developer to easily test the new operations, and switch back to the existing implementations if necessary.

Areas we are looking at include search methods on RWCString, methods on collections for sorting and search with iterators, as well as new higher level parallel algorithms that we could add to SourcePro DB.  We are actively soliciting feedback from our customers on which classes and methods are used most frequently, as well as ideas on where parallelism could provide the most benefit.  Please comment with your ideas and interests to help us maximize the benefit from these new enhancements.

By Patrick Leonard, VP Engineering & Product Strategy

Recently I had the opportunity to address the Chicago chapter of ACM (Association of Computer Machinery) on the subject of parallel computing. In addition to giving me the opportunity to make a Star Wars reference or two,
it was a very interesting conversation on the subject. About a quarter of the attendees were from the financial services industry and close to half of the attendees are interested in using GPUs.

The main point of my talk was to give an overview on current trends in the industry and to discuss a model for parallel computing in software development. Most parallel programming has been focused at the task and data level with tools like OpenMP and MPI. Data parallelism continues to be very important, but I suggest that there is a higher level of granularity in parallel computing - Service Parallelism.

Service Parallelism is essentially the intersection of SOA and parallel computing. Rather than taking a loop or function inside of a program and making a parallel you take a whole service and run multiple instances of that service (loops can be parallel too, they are just running inside the service).

There are several advantages to this:

• If you already have services there is little to no recoding required.
• Changing service parallelism means a change in configuration not encode so ongoing maintenance is much easier.
• Service parallelism separates the parallel aspect of the application from the logic so your application developers don’t have to be experts in the parallel model.

If you are interested in a review of industry trends on multi-core CPU, GPU, and ideas for software parallelism, take a look at the slides on the Rogue Wave web site.