Parallel Programming is Here - Are You Ready?

Advances in multicore architectures is driving the need for parallel programming. Parallel programming allows you to write scalable, flexible code that harnesses more HPC CPU resources and maximizes memory and I/O. It also allows users of the code - whether it's you, a member of your organization's engineering or scientific staff, or a customer - to solve problems that could not be solved using sequential programs, and solve them more quickly Developers who have honed their parallel programming skills are ready to create applications that reach new levels of scalability, performance, safety and reliability. In particular, parallelism can be exploited in mechanical computer-aided engineering (MCAE) applications code for structural analysis and fluid dynamics, in computational chemistry and computational physics simulations and modeling, and industrial applications that run the gamut from oil and gas exploration to the design of high end golf equipment.

Parallel programming is not easy:

However, as computer science professor Andrew S. Tanenbaum stated at the USENIX' 08 conference, "Sequential programming is really hard?the difficulty is that parallel programming is a step beyond that." Bronson Messer, a computational astrophysicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) points out that to do computing at the large scales he and his colleagues encounter daily, the application developer needs to understand the entire HPC ecosystem which includes multicore CPUs, high speed file and connective systems, and terabytes of memory that have to be swapped in and out at blinding speeds.

What's a developer to do?

In order to help developers and engineers meet the challenges posed by parallel programming, Sun Microsystems is offering a series of seminars called "An Introduction to Parallel Programming" discussing parallel programming as a fundamental of application development. Log on weekly to access each of these seven modules presented by mathematician and Sun senior staff engineer Ruud van der Pas.