By Gaston Hillar
“You already know that achieving a linear speedup as the number of cores increases in real life parallelized applications is indeed very difficult. However, sometimes, the multicore scalability of certain algorithms for existing multicore systems could be worse than expected. The overhead and the bugs introduced by concurrency could bring really unexpected scalability problems when the number of cores increases. Intel can help you with its Parallel Universe Portal, a free service in the cloud.
You don’t have access to a system with an Intel Xeon X5560 CPU running at a maximum clock speed of 2.80 GHz and offering 8 Hyperthreaded physical cores (16 logical cores, 16 hardware threads). However, you want to test the multicore scalability for an algorithm as the number of cores increases, up to 16 logical cores. If your application is written in C++, you can compile it in 32-bits to run on Windows and the total time needed to run it using 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 logical cores in less than 1 minute, you can use the new scalability service offered by Intel Parallel Universe Portal. If you already own a system with 16 logical cores, you can skip this post. ”
