Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2007 - (Page 16)

d11lead_p5ma.qxp 9/10/07 9:37 AM Page 16 Strategic Vision by Michael Swaine Smart Compi l But Smart And not because of multicore alone “Compilers are the underpinnings of the most important software,” says James Reinders, Chief Evangelist and Director of Marketing and Business Development for Intel Software Products. “They build operating systems, all the infrastructure, most of the programming languages, millions of applications.” These crucial tools of the programming craft are getting smarter, but certain developments in hardware and software mandate that they get a lot smarter. First, evidence that compilers are getting smarter: “This week’s news about a company named Tilera focused on two fronts: It is an MIT spin-off and its first release is a 64-core-processor called the ‘Tile64.’ But focusing on these two issues somewhat misses the point. The real news about Tilera is the software— specifically, its Multicore Development Environment.” (Dr. Dobb’s Report, August 21, 2007.) What makes Tilera’s MDE big news is its multitiered approaches to parallelism, including SIMD compiler intrinsics to enable fine-grain parallelism across those 64 cores. Second, why compilers need to get a lot smarter: In a widely cited paper earlier this summer, researchers at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign presented a programming model for thousand-core microprocessors. “In such a model,” they argue, “compilers and related tools require much more advanced program analysis capabilities and programmer assertions than what are currently available…to drive automatic or interactive parallel code generation tools.” (“Implicitly Parallel Processing Models for Thousand-Core Microprocessors,” Hwu et al., DAC 2007.) In short, if multicore processors are the future, compilers are going to need to get smarter. 16 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l November 2007 Your Parallel Future But are multicore processors the future? Microsoft’s David Tarditi (Principal Researcher, Advanced Compiler Technology group) thinks so. “Multicore computing, and more generally parallelism, is really going to be important,” he says. “Clock speeds aren’t increasing. Most of the performance increase is going to have to come from parallelism.” Intel’s Geoff Lowney, director of Compiler and Architecture Advanced Development, agrees: “The most significant technological advance we will see in compilers in the next few years will be the widespread support for parallelism. Almost all future processors will have multiple cores. Over the next few years, almost all languages will develop extensions to deal with parallelism, and compilers will focus on the problem of mapping computation across multiple cores.” Hardware and software parallelism that was formerly the exclusive province of scientific computing and GPU programming is the future of software development generally. So can we expect super-smart compilers in a few years that efficiently and automatically parallelize your algorithms and legacy code? Probably not. The consensus of those we spoke with seems to be that compilers can’t possibly be smart enough. “It is very http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2007

Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook Smart Compilers - But Smart Enough? Conversations Grid-Enabling Resource-Intensive Applications Distributed Computing: Windows and Linux Adobe AIR: Desktop/Web Convergence Transparency on Demand Reusable Associations Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2007

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