Forward Scaling for Multicore Performance

The era of sequential, single-threaded software development deployed to a uniprocessor machine is rapidly fading into history. Nearly all computers sold today have at least two, if not four cores – and will have eight in the near future. Intel announced last month the successful production and testing of a new 48-core research processor which will be made available to industry and academia for research and development of manycore parallel software developer tools and languages.

Intel's recently announced 48-core processor

In the near future users of high performance software in finance, bio-informatics, or GIS will expect their applications to scale with core count, and software that fails to do so will either need to be rewritten or abandoned. To future-proof performance-sensitive software, code written today needs to be multicore aware, and scale automatically to all available cores – this is the key idea behind forward scaling software. If Moore’s ‘law’ is to be sustained into the future, hardware scalability must be joined with a similar shift in software. This fundamental shift in computing and application development, termed the ‘Manycore Shift’ by Microsoft, is an evolutionary shift that software developers must appreciate and adapt to in order to create long-living scalable applications.

CenterSpace’s Forward Scaling Strategy

This project of creating forward scaling software can sound daunting, but for many application developers it can be reduced to choosing the right languages & libraries for the computationally demanding portions of their application. If an application’s performance-sensitive components are forward scaling, so goes the application. At CenterSpace we are very performance sensitive and are working to insure that our users benefit from forward scaling behavior. Linear scaling with core number cannot always be achieved, but in the numerical computational domain we can frequently come close to this ideal.

Here are some parallel computing technologies that we are looking at adopting to ensure we meet this goal.
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