Parallel Computer Architecture

Intel Software is pleased to announce the availability of Intel Parallel Studio XE 2020 Update 2. This release includes functional and security updates, also all tools updated to the latest version.

Intel Software is pleased to announce the availability of Intel Parallel Studio XE 2020 Update 2. This release includes functional and security updates, also all tools updated to the latest version.

Despite five decades of research, parallel computing remains an exotic, frontier technology on the fringes of mainstream computing. Its much-heralded triumph over sequential computing has yet to materialize. This is in spite of the fact that the processing needs of many signal processing applications continue to eclipse the capabilities of sequential computing. The culprit is largely the software development environment. Fundamental shortcomings in the development environment of many parallel computer architectures thwart the adoption of parallel computing.

The advent of multicore processors has renewed interest in the idea of incorporating transactions into the programming model used to write parallel programs. This approach, known as transactional memory, offers an alternative, and hopefully better, way to coordinate concurrent threads. The ACI (atomicity, consistency, isolation) properties of transactions provide a foundation to ensure that concurrent reads and writes of shared data do not produce inconsistent or incorrect results. At a higher level, a computation wrapped in a transaction executes atomically - either it completes successfully and commits its result in its entirety or it aborts.

The best-selling computer organization book is thoroughly updated to provide a new focus on the revolutionary change taking place in industry today: the switch from uniprocessor to multicore microprocessors. This new emphasis on parallelism is supported by updates reflecting the newest technologies, with examples highlighting the latest processor designs and benchmarking standards.