By James Reinders
This month, we introduced Intel Parallel Studio 2011. It is a very worthy successor to the original Intel Parallel Studio by expanding both on the tooling and the parallel programming models it offers.

On the tooling, we have the Intel Parallel Advisor tool. It is an exciting tool that is a joy to use when considering where to add parallelism into an existing program. It has a straight-forward interface to find “hot spots” and add annotations about what you are considering doing to the program. Specifically, you can say “I’m thinking of doing this region in parallel” and “I’ll put some sort of a lock around this code.” Adding such annotations is done with a few mouse clicks and no work on syntax. Parallel Advisor then offers interactive estimates of speed-up and options to improve, as well as feedback on the correctness of the algorithm. If you forget a lock, you may see great speed-up estimates but will get exact feedback on where race conditions will exist (errors!!!). Having this tool can change lives of programmers adding parallelism to programs.

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