Intel acquires two software firms

Intel has quietly snapped up two software companies in the last 30 days with aim of boosting development of applications that take better advantage of chips with more than one processing core.

In a company blog, the chipmaker indicated the acquisition of Cilk at the end of last month and then Rapidmind earlier this week. Both are small companies that employ under 50 people. The acquisitions follow the purchase of software company Wind River Systems in June.

"Over the last few years, there has been a gradual emergence of multicore microprocessors. It's put parallelism in more and more machines," James Reinders, chief evangelist and director of marketing and sales at Intel, said in a phone interview Friday, explaining why Intel bought the two firms.

"If you look at traditional applications, ones that we use everyday, it's fair to say that most are not exploiting parallelism--at least not to the full extent," Reinders said.

A multicore processor is defined as any chip with more than one processing core. Today, almost all Intel chips that go into laptops, desktops, and servers have at least two cores. The challenge for Intel is to make sure that applications take advantage of all the cores--so-called parallelism. This has historically presented a challenge for software programmers.

"The operating system does stuff for applications in parallel," Reinders said, referring to operating systems such as Windows. "But considering that we can produce more and more cores every year, to truly get the benefit of what the future holds, applications need to change. And most applications haven't changed," he said.

The goal is to facilitate the development of parallel programming. "How do we help software developers tackle parallel programming? Both companies had teams of experts that had been focused on this problem. So, they're kindred spirits," he said.

Writing about Cilk in a blog, Reinders said Intel sees "great opportunities for Cilk to integrate with our parallel tools...including Intel Parallel Studio." The firm's technology enables "mainstream programmers to develop multithreaded (or parallel) applications...Providing a smooth path to multicore for legacy (older) applications that otherwise cannot easily leverage the performance capabilities of multicore processors," according to Cilk's Web site. Original Cilk research was done at MIT.

Rapidmind was founded five years ago as Serious Hack and grew out of work at the University of Waterloo. It boasts advanced technology for helping software developers with data parallel programming for multicore processors and accelerators.

The cost of the two acquisitions was not disclosed.

[pentest]

""If you look at traditional applications, ones that we use everyday, it's fair to say that most are not exploiting parallelism--at least not to the full extent," Reinders said."


Duh!

Most desktop applications are not inherently parallelizable. The are either user or network bound. On the desktop the future of multi-cores is tweaking the OS to use the cores more intelligently. Windows running on a quad core should run in one core, give all the security software a core, and leave the last two for actual applications.

The vast majority of applications that can truly be run in parallel are not running on desktops, they are running in servers, clusters, and supercomputers.

Desktop apps won't be unless they are rewritten in a functional language which make parrallelism trivial, but even then the gains will not be much. It certainly won't justify the time and cost of porting them to Lisp or Haskell, not that most programmers understand functional languages.

[santuccie]

You're right; Windows isn't there yet. But thankfully, MS is listening: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1612

That said, while Windows isn't designed for parallel processing, it currently does quite well in multi-core processing. And if you want to set CPU affinities, there are third-party apps for that, Process Lasso being one.

[pentest]

All OS's have a way to go in this area, but it is the future of multicore on the desktop,

What I think is funny is Intel planning to put out 8 core processors for desktops. What a waste.

[santuccie]

True, but just watch... before you know it, you'll need a 16-core processor and post-SLI graphics with umpteen gigabytes of GDDR5 to run the latest version of Crysis. Also around that time, SLC SSDs may be the storage standard. Moore's law chugs on.

[OptimalSupreme]

First off they already have the Amiga os and chipsets -true muliticore -true mulitichip processing

hence real-time mulitiasking

sony admits to being an amiga clone on each and every ps3 -via demo

The itanium came from this venture and as a result in 2000 so did the ps3 - with Intels help

Amiga=Itanium=Ps3

Intel also owns nvidia another Amiga cloner

[odubtaig]

Cool, there's someone crazier than "Commander_Spock" here.

[Melekai]

Snow Leopard addresses this issue directly with "Grand Central".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch

[eightwings]

Interesting news. As much as the powers that be at Intel know that multithreading is not the answer to the parallel programming crisis, they also know that they have wedged themselves between a rock and a hard place. They have way too much invested in last century's legacy technologies to change strategy at this late stage of the game. It makes sense for them to acquire outfits like Rapidmind and Cilk. The former specializes in domain specific application development tools for multicore processors while the latter makes clever programs that discover concurrent tasks in legacy sequential programs. Intel's intelligentsia figure that this should give them enough breathing room while they contemplate their next move. Question is, is this a good strategy? I really don't think so.

In my opinion, Intel, AMD and the others are leading their customers astray by making them believe that multithreading is the future of parallel computing. Billions of dollars will be spent on making the painful transition by converting legacy code for the new thread-based multicore processors. The problem is that multithreading not just a bad way to program parallel code, it is the cause of the crisis. Rapidmind and Cilk are not going to change that simple fact. These acquisitions are just a way of trying to force a round peg into a square hole as much as it can go. Sooner or later, a real maverick will show up and do the right thing and there shall be much weeping and gnashing of teeth . Being a behemoth is no guarantee of long-term survival in the computer business. Sorry, Intel.

Google or Bing "How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis" if you're interested in finding about the real solution to the crisis.

[odubtaig]

I just did. There's a 'solution' that hasn't been fully thought out.

[tangosquared]

Microsoft offers two possible solutions to help address this. The first is the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) which is included in both the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio SDK and the CCR & DSS Toolkit. A free downloadable Express Edition is available for the former (www.microsoft.com/robotics). CCR enables a simpler model for writing async apps without the complexity of threads and locks and callbacks and the message passing architecture avoids the typical issues of shared data. The library also provides automatic load balancing for multiple cores or you can define affinities for running things on specific cores.

CCR is already in use in several enterprise level applications, including security systems by Tyco, the USPS sorting machines by Siemens, and the website maintained by MySpace to name a few.

CCR only runs on Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) and CE and requires a version of .Net.

CCR generally requires design upfront so may not be the best choice for legacy apps, but coming in .Net 4.0 (already shown at Microsoft PDC) is TPL and PLINQ, libraries which should allow for easy implementation of parallelfors and sorts.