The first problem in Phase 2 of the 2010 Intel Threading Challenge contest has closed.  I'm very pleased that we had over 20 entries across the two problem classes from around the world.  Right now the judging staff is preparing to begin compiling and running the enter applications against the chosen data sets.

The biggest change for this contest is the use of the Intel(R) Manycore Testing Lab. The shared platforms allow contestants to have access to hardware and software that is the same as that used by the judges when evaluating the entered codes. Contestants are now able to tune their entries to the exact machine specs rather than having to code "in the dark" and hope that their solution will execute well when the judges test it. For the judges, the hope is that entries will compile and run without any modifications. (In the past, working through differences in systems, libraries used, and compiler versions between the diverse set of development platforms used and the platforms used for scoring took many hours.)

As with previous problems, the clever participants were able to think beyond the scope envisioned by the judges as the problem descriptions were written up. This led to some long discussions clarifications of the original problem intentions within the ISN forums devoted to the problems. We expect it all worked out well enough for all participants. The judges have taken these discussions to heart and, hopefully, have been able to anticipate better the loopholes that might be found in the current and upcoming problems.

Best of luck to those that submitted an entry for this first problem of Phase 2.  If you missed the deadline for the first problem, it is not too late to get started. The second problem has been posted and will end at noon (PDT) on 20 SEP 2010. Each problem awards prizes to the top three point total entries and the grand prize will be given to the contestant with the highest combined point total from their top three scoring entries. Go to the Threading Challenge 2010 page for details on the problems and how to enter.

After decades of sturm und drang over whether or not to include parallelism in the undergraduate computer science curriculum, we can announce definitively that battle is over. Parallelism is here, and it already abides.
Fortunately, we are not left staring into the abyss. Academia, Industry and Developers are cooperating to help define what the new landscape (or seascape) should look like. While the details are still coming into focus, certain aspects now dominate the discussion:

• We should get beyond thinking about teaching “parallel programming” -- it’s all just programming.
• Parallelism must be introduced early into the curriculum - no later than second year, and it must inform all relevant courses.
• New focus must be paid to architecture - but not the same architecture we’ve been teaching for years.
• Design patterns will take on increasing importance.
• Parallel models are no longer in their infancy - some are mature and can be widely adopted.
• Hiring managers are looking for general knowledge of parallelism more than specific tool sets.
• As educators, we must prepare our students to make the decisions that industry demands - the tools, models, and patterns will lead our way forward.

Agree? Disagree? Good.
We’re going to be having a conversation about this at the IDF education panel “Navigating in a Sea of Cores” on Monday, September 13th. We have representatives from industry and from academia on the panel, and expect to have a lively discussion there continuing through lunch afterwards.

http://idfcommunity.intel.com/planner/SessionCatalog.aspx?track=(ACA).

Free passes are available to educators -Enter the code ACAWEB1 when you register.

For those of you who can’t attend, or for those who want to dry-lab the discussion, we’re also going to have a series of blog posts by some of the contributors. We’ll also be adding links to those further discussions here, so you can just check back to keep up to date!

AMD (NYSE:AMD) today announced that a number of technology partners soon plan to release an inexpensive Single Link DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter. The addition of the adapter to the burgeoning ATI Eyefinity ecosystem comes on the heels of the recently announced inc...

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that Chekib Akrout, senior vice president & general manager, technology group, will present a keynote address at the First Annual GLOBALFOUNDRIES Global Technology Conference 9:30 a.m. PT on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 in San...

(note: this is slide 5 of the nulstein plog)

In an Agatha Christie novel, this slide would really go at the end of the talk, everything would finally get revealed only in the end, leaving the reader to play detective, picking up clues as the story unfolds... But that's not what I want, this slide goes here, like in a good old Columbo episode: you get to see what happened straight away, and we'll go over everything again to understand the details and make everything right again.

Having found the functional decomposition too complex for my taste, I went back a few steps, trying to split the work up along a different edge. At the time, I was looking at Google's map-reduce and also at the Larrabee rendererer, and one thing really struck me then: what Abrash describes can be seen as a system that maps triangles to tiles and then reduces these to bitmaps... And to generalize this: it is okay to break a process in sequential steps, as long as each step exhibits good parallelism.

Isn't that great: sequential is okay, after all!

This lead me to break the update in two parts: a read-only part and a write-only part. When all that gets done is reading, there is no need for locks, everybody can do it at once. When all that gets done is changing own state, again there is no contention possible and no arbitration is required. Of course, there are a few more nuts and bolts required to make this work, but here you have it: split that update in two phases, and everything can get updated in parallel much more easily.

Breaking the draw phase down is quite easy too, collect information about what everything wants to draw, sort that and do the actual render in multiple deferred render-contexts (as provided by DirectX 11). Here, it can almost be seen as straight map-reduce: a set of objects is processed to generate set of intermediate key/value pairs, which gets reduced into a set of command lists, ready to render.

The unexpected part for me, when carrying out development, was that I would still have one thread just talking to DX and very busy doing that. That's the part I was trying to kill and, as it turned out, it did survive and stop being a problem.

There are five slides before we really dive into the details of how this works, which should turn into a couple of weeks worth of blogging, so I'd like to invite everyone who is interested to start playing in their mind with the idea of two-stage update (all read and, later, all write). Look for things that don't look like they should work, look for ways to address those problems, try and see what in your game would stop working if it had to be written like that, and try to think if there would be any way to fix it. That's the great thing about making this talk a plog: you get to really think about what I present while I'm presenting it. The unfortunate thing is that our comments system seems to be down at the moment and we can't interact properly. So, if anybody wants to feedback, feel free, you can twitter @jmuffat or email jerome dot muffat dash meridol at intel dot com.

Next time, demo! : to be continued
Spoiler (slides+source code): here

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

• Intel to purchase Infineon's Wireless Solutions Business, called WLS, in a cash transaction valued at approximately $1.4 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2011.
  
• WLS sale enables Infineon to expand leading position in markets for automotive, industry and security technologies.
  
• WLS will operate as a standalone business. Intel is committed to serving WLS' existing customers, including support for ARM-based platforms.
  
• The acquisition expands Intel's current Wi-Fi and 4G WiMAX offerings to include Infineon's 3G capabilities and supports Intel's plans to accelerate LTE. The acquired technology will be used in Intel® Core processor-based laptops, and myriad of Intel® Atom™ processor-based devices, including smartphones, netbooks, tablets and embedded computers.
  
• The deal aligns with Internet connectivity pillar of Intel's computing strategy.
  

Webcast Replay

• Webcast: Infineon Sells Wireless Solutions Business to Intel
  

View the Full Story
(includes the full story with related links)

Now you can read the source code for my Seismic Duck game on Source Forge.  I open-sourced the code for several reasons:

• My blogs on parallelizing it with SSE and TBB omit details of interest.  The blogs chiefly concern the seismic wave propagation code in Source/Wavefield.cpp .
• Games about reflection seismology are not runaway best sellers.
• It's limited to Windows.  I'd like to find volunteers to port it to other platforms.   Mac OS is of particular interest, since it is common in educational settings.   The OS-specific parts are about 600 lines of C++.

The code is my own hobby, not Intel's.   As such, comments are  sparse.  I'll expand them as questions arise.  If you are interested in porting it to new platforms, please contact me and I'll help as best I can.

I'm not really big on "shopping" as a sport. Some people love to wander the up and down the aisles of Costco on a "treasure hunt" to see new and unexpected items for sale or wander from store to store in a shopping mall.  I'm more one of those "hunters" who targets what I need, goes in for the kill, and relaxes in the cave after the hunt.

But I can see how something like the smart kiosks that Paul Otellini showed off in his Comdex keynote would be cool for shopping athletes. (Spendletes?) In case you missed it the first time around, here it is again:

Here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ConBYAzAfk

Offhand, if you were given the job to build something like this for a customer, what kind of technology would you need to pull it off?

• 3D graphics. Plenty of animations which would be nicely rendered in OpenGL or it's cousins.
• Touch input with a really big touch screen area.
• Recognition algorithms which can take a video feed and determine the height and gender of the shopper.
• Video playback. You probably want efficient video decode.
• Networking and a quick database connector to look up loyalty memberships
• Blue tooth connection to send directions or coupons to your phone
• How about enough processing horsepower to handle multiple of these kiosks in the store

Although all of these appear to be important, the most critical technology of them all is not even listed here.

The most important technology is that it doesn't crash.

When I see something like this demo, I imagine kids coming into the store and playing around with it endlessly. I see teen hackers trying to break into the network somehow. I see a store staffed with employees who don't have the training to fix it if it goes haywire.

That's why this kind of thing is considered an embedded application. If you deploy something like this in your store, the last thing you want to see is a BIOS setup screen or the Blue Screen of Death. You design it to be tough as a tank and to run forever.

Frankly, this is one reason why people start with systems like an embedded Linux system, which has a great reputation for running for months on end with no intervention even with advanced technologies running on top.

Of course, it's just a short step from this kiosk to the kinds of displays we saw in "Minority Report"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQbVD5hlddk

No telling when people will be willing to give up their privacy for the sake of a better tank top at The Gap.

I just published a post at my other blog about Intel's Parallel Studio for OpenMP and MPI applications. My Conclusion is that this tool is useful for OpenMP (and TBB) but not for MPI.
You are welcome to read it from here (http://telzur.blogspot.com/2010/08/testing-intels-parallel-studio.html).
Starting from the forthcoming semester I am going to incorporate Intel's Parallel Studio in my Parallel Processing course for demos and for hands on practice during lab sessions.

It looks like Cisco has issued both an end-of-sale and end-of-life announcement for their Cisco ACE XML Gateway.

In response, the SOA Expressway team has teed-up a special offer for Cisco customers looking to move to replacement XML Gateway.

This is an interesting development to be sure, and it probably signals that Cisco is seeing less demand for XML traffic than anticipated. Voice and video probably have taken over a larger share.

All this being said, I remember talking to a CTO at a major networking company (not Cisco) about 5 years ago about the proportion of XML traffic as a fraction of total Internet traffic, and while I forgot his name, I can't forget his comment which was something along the lines of: "90% percent of Internet traffic is spam and porn."

I wonder how much the proportion has changed in the last 5 years? Hopefully it is an upward trend :)

In recent weeks, I have been working on MeshCentral, a central web site for managing all our computers. I got lots of features added in and more to come but I wanted to make the web site more user friendly by adding pop-up tool tips as certain places. I also wanted it to not be annoying and be compatible with touch screen devices such as the Apple iPad and the many others that are likely to hit the market.

I just started getting familiar with JQuery and looking for JQuery compatible tool tips is easy, there are many of them. In fact, JQuery as basic support already built-in. Sadly, all of these will detect that the mouse hovers over an area and display the help. First, I wanted to have the user click to get help, avoiding having tip windows pop in and out as the mouse moves. I also wanted the tip window to close using a close button. This way, the site would work great for tablet owners.

After some research I found a great example in "atooltip", it did exactly what I wanted but did have some quarks I had to fix. For example: When clicking many tips in a row, the help text would pile up on the window. I also has a problem with my social configuration page. The user on that page can opt to hide portions of the page, and hitting a tool top and closing the area on the page should close the tool tip.

Well, took about two hours but tool tip help support is now added to MeshCentral. I only use it in two pages (account & social settings), but more to come.

Ylian
meshcentral.homeip.net

Did you know that Intel funds projects by employees which focus on bettering the environment?  Ken Brown, Intel manufacturing employee -- and scuba diver – was the recipient of a grant from Intel’s Sustainability in Action Program.  Ken is contributing to a photography effort called Portrait of a Coral Reef.  And Intel technology, a cluster of multi-core based systems,-will do sophisticated image crunching for researchers at the University of California at San Diego who are studying changes in the fragile reef due to climate change, pollution, and invasive species.

Did you know that Intel funds projects by employees which focus on bettering the environment?  Ken Brown, Intel manufacturing employee -- and scuba diver – was the recipient of a grant from Intel’s Sustainability in Action Program.  Ken is contributing to a photography effort called Portrait of a Coral Reef.  And Intel technology, a cluster of multi-core based systems,-will do sophisticated image crunching for researchers at the University of California at San Diego who are studying changes in the fragile reef due to climate change, pollution, and invasive species.

(note: this is slide 4 of the nulstein plog)

I like calling the time when I started writing games "the good old days", it was in the nineties, DOOM's era, I had quit doing IT development work for hire to join a crazy team, doing creative stuff, pushing machines and people to the limits of what they could achieve. Everything felt heroic, there were no ready-made bricks, you'd start from almost scratch every time. As Hervé Lange used to put it: "imagine you're making movies and building the camera is part of the process". It felt good and it feels like long time ago now (it is) and, to be fair, the only thing that's now false in this statement is that you don't have to build the camera any more (but still, you can...)

Back on topic. The sequence of operations in a video game is very straight forward: frame, frame, frame, frame... We keep rendering frames, in a loop, evolving based on the players' inputs and the state of the previous frame (ie "render-farm" style is not the way to go). The work for a frame splits in two main parts: updating game state (advancing time) and drawing it. And inside these parts, we find modules that are loosely connected : collision/physics, AI, audio, scripted mechanisms, visibility/culling, the actual rendering and more... When everything was sequential, it was possible to use the order in which these were processed to make our lives simpler, but order wasn't so critical. So, when CPUs with multiple cores started to appear, the natural thing to try was to split per module and spread work like that. GPUs had been around for a while too, and the idea of a pipeline that would go from one core to the next to then move on to the GPU felt like it made sense.

This approach sorts of work with two cores: one core runs the update side of things, the second deals with drawing things and off everything goes to the GPU. Nice and easy breakdown, data always flowing in the same direction, looks cool on the paper. Until you start tuning... In the really old days when the term "3D accelerator" hadn't even be invented, everything happened on the same chip, it was like juggling with one ball (I can do that). Add a GPU: depending on what you do you might be CPU bound or GPU bound and the optimal use of the machine is to get both to spend about the same amount of time working, you can achieve this by varying the amount of graphics detail, it's as easy as juggling with two balls (I can do that too!). Now, in a pipelined model like I was describing, you want the core that updates the game, the one that draws the frame and the GPU rendering polygons to all spend about the same amount of time working, and I'll call that juggling with three balls (which I can't do, but hope to achieve one day). But then there are four cores, six cores, hyper-threading, and it's clear that pipelining won't work.

The next logical step is to keep the principle of functional decomposition and get rid of the pipeline idea only. Also, because some modules can leverage parallelism internally, like physics that can process islands separately, it becomes possible to spread work a little more easily. Data flow is more complicated but the real difficulty is synchronisation between the various modules. Together with the need to balance work between all cores, this converges to require the engine to split work in ever smaller jobs. The ideal chunk of work being one that executes in a reasonably small amount of time and never needs to wait for any other...

This is how one goes from moving AI to a separate thread, to splitting it in sub-groups, and again until reaching the level of the individual and moving on to split behaviours in separate "aspects". And then only do you finally have jobs that never wait (and are small). Cores can be kept busy and dependencies are implicitly managed by jobs firing as their prerequisites happen. The main difficulty that arises now is complexity, you have to think in terms of objects at a level of granularity below the individual unit (from the player's point of view). The resulting jobs are also likely to end up being so small they become too small and the overhead of managing them starts to weight on performances. Like I said last time: this is hard!

I think the best description available online of a system that works is the one about Dice's Frostbite engine. Slide 26, the CPU job graph looks scary at first and probably isn't that bad but it does illustrate really well both the need for breaking things down in small blocks and for keeping track of dependencies. Slide 29 shows that even in one of the most elaborate engines today, it is unavoidable to have cores going idle waiting for other cores to finish.

But do we have to go down to that level of complexity? In this project, I'm showing an alternative approach that attacks the problem from a different angle. But, this post is already long, you'll have to wait for next time...

Next time we'll see how work is subdivided in nulstein
Spoiler (slides+source code): here

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 27, 2010 – Intel Corporation today announced that third-quarter revenue will be below the company’s previous outlook. The company now expects third-quarter revenue to be $11.0 billion, plus or minus $200 million, compared to the previous expectation of between $11.2 and $12.0 billion. Revenue is being affected by weaker than expected demand for consumer PCs in mature markets. Inventories across the supply chain appear to be in-line with the company’s revised expectations.

The company’s expectation for third-quarter gross margin is now 66 percent, plus or minus a point, lower than the previous expectation of 67 percent, plus or minus a couple of points. The impact of lower volume is being partially offset by slightly higher average selling prices stemming from solid enterprise demand.

Equity Investments, Interest and Other is expected to be $175 million, consistent with the company’s revised expectation reported on Form 8-K filed July 16.

All other expectations for the third quarter remain unchanged. The outlook for the third quarter does not include the effect of any acquisitions, divestitures or similar transactions that may be completed after Aug. 26.

The company will update fourth-quarter and full-year expectations with its third-quarter earnings report on Oct. 12.

Status of Business Outlook

During the quarter, Intel’s corporate representatives may reiterate the Business Outlook during private meetings with investors, investment analysts, the media and others. From the close of business on Sep. 3 until publication of the company’s third-quarter earnings release, Intel will observe a “Quiet Period” during which the Business Outlook disclosed in the company’s news releases and filings with the SEC should be considered as historical, speaking as of prior to the Quiet Period only and not subject to an update by the company.

Risk Factors

The above statements and any others in this document that refer to plans and expectations for the third quarter, the year and the future are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Many factors could affect Intel’s actual results, and variances from Intel’s current expectations regarding such factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements. Intel presently considers the following to be the important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the corporation’s expectations.

• Demand could be different from Intel's expectations due to factors including changes in business and economic conditions; customer acceptance of Intel’s and competitors’ products; changes in customer order patterns including order cancellations; and changes in the level of inventory at customers.
• Intel operates in intensely competitive industries that are characterized by a high percentage of costs that are fixed or difficult to reduce in the short term and product demand that is highly variable and difficult to forecast. Additionally, Intel is in the process of transitioning to its next generation of products on 32nm process technology, and there could be execution issues associated with these changes, including product defects and errata along with lower than anticipated manufacturing yields. Revenue and the gross margin percentage are affected by the timing of Intel product introductions and the demand for and market acceptance of Intel's products; actions taken by Intel's competitors, including product offerings and introductions, marketing programs and pricing pressures and Intel’s response to such actions; defects or disruptions in the supply of materials or resources; and Intel’s ability to respond quickly to technological developments and to incorporate new features into its products.
• The gross margin percentage could vary significantly from expectations based on changes in revenue levels; product mix and pricing; start-up costs; variations in inventory valuation, including variations related to the timing of qualifying products for sale; excess or obsolete inventory; manufacturing yields; changes in unit costs; impairments of long-lived assets, including manufacturing, assembly/test and intangible assets; the timing and execution of the manufacturing ramp and associated costs; and capacity utilization.
• Expenses, particularly certain marketing and compensation expenses, as well as restructuring and asset impairment charges, vary depending on the level of demand for Intel's products and the level of revenue and profits.
• The tax rate expectation is based on current tax law and current expected income. The tax rate may be affected by the jurisdictions in which profits are determined to be earned and taxed; changes in the estimates of credits, benefits and deductions; the resolution of issues arising from tax audits with various tax authorities, including payment of interest and penalties; and the ability to realize deferred tax assets.
• Gains or losses from equity securities and interest and other could vary from expectations depending on gains or losses on the sale, exchange, change in the fair value or impairments of debt and equity investments; interest rates; cash balances; and changes in fair value of derivative instruments.
• The majority of Intel’s non-marketable equity investment portfolio balance is concentrated in companies in the flash memory market segment, and declines in this market segment or changes in management’s plans with respect to Intel’s investments in this market segment could result in significant impairment charges, impacting restructuring charges as well as gains/losses on equity investments and interest and other.
• Intel's results could be impacted by adverse economic, social, political and physical/infrastructure conditions in countries where Intel, its customers or its suppliers operate, including military conflict and other security risks, natural disasters, infrastructure disruptions, health concerns and fluctuations in currency exchange rates.
• Intel’s results could be affected by the timing of closing of acquisitions and divestitures.
• Intel's results could be affected by adverse effects associated with product defects and errata (deviations from published specifications), and by litigation or regulatory matters involving intellectual property, stockholder, consumer, antitrust and other issues, such as the litigation and regulatory matters described in Intel's SEC reports. An unfavorable ruling could include monetary damages or an injunction prohibiting us from manufacturing or selling one or more products, precluding particular business practices, impacting Intel’s ability to design its products, or requiring other remedies such as compulsory licensing of intellectual property.

A detailed discussion of these and other factors that could affect Intel’s results is included in Intel’s SEC filings, including the report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 26, 2010.

About Intel
Intel  (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company  designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the  foundation for the world’s computing devices. Additional information  about Intel is available at newsroom.intel.com and blogs.intel.com.

Intel is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that Thomas Seifert, chief financial officer, will present at the Citi Technology Conference at 2:10 p.m. ET on Tuesday, September 7, 2010 in New York, New York.

A real-time audio webcast of the presentation can be access...

A few days ago I received my iPhone 4 and I absolutely love it! The setup was pretty straightforward and easy to navigate. So far the only thing that took any length of time was the necessary step of downloading iTunes for the device which is primarily used for syncing contacts, email, and the like from my PC. After toying around with this device for a few days and gathering my initial impressions I started pondering the past, present, and likely the future for Smart/iPhones.

Historically speaking my early cell phones progressed from an early MicroTac (1996) to a MPX200 Smartphone (2003). After that I found I pretty much only used the Smartphone for the calendar functionally and sort of gave up on them for awhile and went back to a normal cell phone (Razr). Over the past few years I then moved towards a Pearl blackberry device which I had more success with in leveraging other functionality such as email, texting, etc.

So what fascinates me the most about all of this and what does it have to do with my position statement about Smart/iPhones being a convergence hub device? There are actually several things. Going back over the history of my cell phones I can’t help but notice that the displays in the 90’s have transitioned from 2D LED’s to the gorgeous touch capable 2D/3D LCD’s that we see today. Furthermore; when you look under the hood at the capabilities of something like an iPhone 4 its literally about twice as powerful as the first desktop PC I purchased which was a Micron P266 with an 8mb video card! Throw in a 5-12 MPix camera and portable Music/Media players (e.g. Walkman, iPod), and I believe there’s been some significant convergence going on in the handheld space.

Given that the capabilities of Smart/iPhones are currently accelerating at a Moore’s law pace or faster; where do they go next? My prediction is that they likely won’t replace PCs (Laptops/Desktops) but will end up being a central “Hub-like” device that enhances one’s existing PCs and other Smart Devices. If past trends are any indication of the future then it’s not out of the realm of possibility that in the next five to ten years Smart/iPhones become more important as they become glorified memory sticks (Hard Drives) tethered to the cloud, keeping your data synchronized. I expect that they’ll end up with processors in the 2-3+ GHz range, with Drive capacities in the range of 100-250GBs or more, and sporting video graphics capable of handling DirectX11/OpenGL 4 games & applications. When we add the additional ability of these devices being able to push or pull wireless HDMI, WiGig, etc types of signals to the mix I foresee some interesting game changing scenarios emerging. At least I hope we’re heading in this direction! In the meantime I’m going to go download some games for my new phone!