Multicore

Multi-core chips from Intel and AMD offer a dramatic boost in speed and responsiveness, and plenty of opportunities for multiprocessing on ordinary desktop computers. But they also present a challenge: More than ever, multithreading is a requirement for good performance. This guide explains how to maximize the benefits of these processors through a portable C++ library that works on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Unix systems. With it, you'll learn how to use Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) effectively for parallel programming -- without having to be a threading expert.

Written by James Reinders, Chief Evangelist of Intel Software Products, and based on the experience of Intel's developers and customers, this book explains the key tasks in multithreading and how to accomplish them with TBB in a portable and robust manner. With plenty of examples and full reference material, the book lays out common patterns of uses, reveals the gotchas in TBB, and gives important guidelines for choosing among alternatives in order to get the best performance.

You'll learn how Intel Threading Building Blocks:

Enables you to specify tasks instead of threads for better portability, easier programming, more understandable source code, and better performance and scalability in general Focuses on the goal of parallelizing computationally intensive work to deliver high-level solutions Is compatible with other threading packages, and doesn't force you to pick one package for your entire program Emphasizes scalable, data-parallel programming, which allows program performance to increase as you add processors Relies on generic programming, which enables you to write the best possible algorithms with the fewest constraints Any C++ programmer who wants to write an application to run on a multi-core system will benefit from this book. TBB is also very approachable for a C programmer or a C++ programmer without much experience with templates. Best of all, you don't need experience with parallel programming or multi-core processors to use this book.

What if your cell phone could detect cancer cells circulating in your blood or warn you of an imminent heart attack? Mobile wireless digital devices, including smartphones and tablets with seemingly limitless functionality, have brought about radical changes in our lives, providing hyper-connectivity to social networks and cloud computing. But the digital world has hardly pierced the medical cocoon.

 Until now. Beyond reading email and surfing the Web, we will soon be checking our vital signs on our phone. We can already continuously monitor our heart rhythm, blood glucose levels, and brain waves while we sleep. Miniature ultrasound imaging devices are replacing the icon of medicine—the stethoscope. DNA sequencing, Facebook, and the Watson supercomputer have already saved lives. For the first time we can capture all the relevant data from each individual to enable precision therapy, prevent major side effects of medications, and ultimately to prevent many diseases from ever occurring. And yet many of these digital medical innovations lie unused because of the medical community’s profound resistance to change. In The Creative Destruction of Medicine, Eric Topol—one of the nation’s top physicians and a leading voice on the digital revolution in medicine—argues that radical innovation and a true democratization of medical care are within reach, but only if we consumers demand it. We can force medicine to undergo its biggest shakeup in history. This book shows us the stakes—and how to win them.

This Expert Guide gives you the techniques and technologies in embedded multicore to optimally design and implement your embedded system. Written by experts with a solutions focus, this encyclopedic reference gives you an indispensable aid to tackling the day-to-day problems when building and managing multicore embedded systems.

Following an embedded system design path from start to finish, our team of experts takes you from architecture, through hardware implementation to software programming and debug.

With this book you will learn:

. What motivates multicore

. The architectural options and tradeoffs; when to use what

. How to deal with the unique hardware challenges that multicore presents

. How to manage the software infrastructure in a multicore environment

. How to write effective multicore programs

. How to port legacy code into a multicore system and partition legacy software

. How to optimize both the system and software

. The particular challenges of debugging multicore hardware and software

Examples demonstrating timeless implementation details
Proven and practical techniques reflecting the authors' expertise built from years of experience and key advice on tackling critical issues

The multicore revolution has reached the deployment stage in embedded systems ranging from small ultramobile devices to large telecommunication servers. The transition from single to multicore processors, motivated by the need to increase performance while conserving power, has placed great responsibility on the shoulders of software engineers. In this new embedded multicore era, the toughest task is the development of code to support more sophisticated systems. This book provides embedded engineers with solid grounding in the skills required to develop software targeting multicore processors. Within the text, the author undertakes an in-depth exploration of performance analysis, and a close-up look at the tools of the trade. Both general multicore design principles and processor-specific optimization techniques are revealed. Detailed coverage of critical issues for multicore employment within embedded systems is provided, including the Threading Development Cycle, with discussions of analysis, design, development, debugging, and performance tuning of threaded applications. Software development techniques engendering optimal mobility and energy efficiency are highlighted through multiple case studies, which provide practical "how-to” advice on implementing the latest multicore processors. Finally, future trends are discussed, including terascale, speculative multithreading, transactional memory, interconnects, and the software-specific implications of these looming architectural developments.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Introduction
Chapter 2 - Basic System and Processor Architecture
Chapter 3 - Multi-core Processors & Embedded
Chapter 4 -Moving To Multi-core Intel Architecture
Chapter 5 - Scalar Optimization & Usability
Chapter 6 - Parallel Optimization Using Threads
Chapter 7 - Case Study: Data Decomposition
Chapter 8 - Case Study: Functional Decomposition
Chapter 9 - Virtualization & Partitioning
Chapter 10 - Getting Ready For Low Power Intel Architecture
Chapter 11 - Summary, Trends, and Conclusions
Appendix I
Glossary
References

*This is the only book to explain software optimization for embedded multi-core systems
*Helpful tips, tricks and design secrets from an Intel programming expert, with detailed examples using the popular X86 architecture
*Covers hot topics, including ultramobile devices, low-power designs, Pthreads vs. OpenMP, and heterogeneous cores

Multiprocessor platforms play important roles in modern computing systems, and appear in various applications, ranging from energy-limited hand-held devices to large data centers. As the performance requirements increase, energy-consumption in these systems also increases significantly. Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), which allows processors to dynamically adjust the supply voltage and the clock frequency to operate on different power/energy levels, is considered an effective way to achieve the goal of energy-saving. This book surveys existing works that have been on energy-aware task scheduling on DVFS multiprocessor platforms. Energy-aware scheduling problems are intrinsically optimization problems, the formulations of which greatly depend on the platform and task models under consideration. Thus, Energy-aware Scheduling on Multiprocessor Platforms covers current research on this topic and classifies existing works according to two key standards, namely, homogeneity/heterogeneity of multi­processor platforms and the task types considered. Under this classification, other sub-issues are also included, such as, slack reclamation, fixed/dynamic priority sched­uling, partition-based/global scheduling, and application-specific power consumption, etc.

Innovations in hardware architecture, like hyper-threading or multicore processors, mean that parallel computing resources are available for inexpensive desktop computers. In only a few years, many standard software products will be based on concepts of parallel programming implemented on such hardware, and the range of applications will be much broader than that of scientific computing, up to now the main application area for parallel computing. Rauber and Rünger take up these recent developments in processor architecture by giving detailed descriptions of parallel programming techniques that are necessary for developing efficient programs for multicore processors as well as for parallel cluster systems and supercomputers. Their book is structured in three main parts, covering all areas of parallel computing: the architecture of parallel systems, parallel programming models and environments, and the implementation of efficient application algorithms. The emphasis lies on parallel programming techniques needed for different architectures. The main goal of the book is to present parallel programming techniques that can be used in many situations for many application areas and which enable the reader to develop correct and efficient parallel programs. Many examples and exercises are provided to show how to apply the techniques. The book can be used as both a textbook for students and a reference book for professionals. The presented material has been used for courses in parallel programming at different universities for many years.

Base stations developed according to the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard require unprecedented processing power. 3GPP LTE enables data rates beyond hundreds of Mbits/s by using advanced technologies, necessitating a highly complex LTE physical layer. The operating power of base stations is a significant cost for operators, and is currently optimized using state-of-the-art hardware solutions, such as heterogeneous distributed systems. The traditional system design method of porting algorithms to heterogeneous distributed systems based on test-and-refine methods is a manual, thus time-expensive, task.   Physical Layer Multi-Core Prototyping: A Dataflow-Based Approach provides a clear introduction to the 3GPP LTE physical layer and to dataflow-based prototyping and programming. The difficulties in the process of 3GPP LTE physical layer porting are outlined, with particular focus on automatic partitioning and scheduling, load balancing and computation latency reduction, specifically in systems based on heterogeneous multi-core Digital Signal Processors. Multi-core prototyping methods based on algorithm dataflow modeling and architecture system-level modeling are assessed with the goal of automating and optimizing algorithm porting.   With its analysis of physical layer processing and proposals of parallel programming methods, which include automatic partitioning and scheduling, Physical Layer Multi-Core Prototyping: A Dataflow-Based Approach is a key resource for researchers and students. This study of LTE algorithms which require dynamic or static assignment and dynamic or static scheduling, allows readers to reassess and expand their knowledge of this vital component of LTE base station design.

Find the right big data solution for your business or organization

Big data management is one of the major challenges facing business, industry, and not-for-profit organizations. Data sets such as customer transactions for a mega-retailer, weather patterns monitored by meteorologists, or social network activity can quickly outpace the capacity of traditional data management tools. If you need to develop or manage big data solutions, you'll appreciate how these four experts define, explain, and guide you through this new and often confusing concept. You'll learn what it is, why it matters, and how to choose and implement solutions that work.Effectively managing big data is an issue of growing importance to businesses, not-for-profit organizations, government, and IT professionalsAuthors are experts in information management, big data, and a variety of solutionsExplains big data in detail and discusses how to select and implement a solution, security concerns to consider, data storage and presentation issues, analytics, and much moreProvides essential information in a no-nonsense, easy-to-understand style that is empowering

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