Wintel, Universities Team On Parallel Programming

kamlapati writes in with a followup from the news last month that Microsoft and Intel are funding a laboratory for research into parallel computing at UC Berkeley. The new development is the imminent delivery of the FPGA-based Berkeley Emulation Engine version 3 (BEE3) that will allow researchers to emulate systems with up to 1,000 cores in order to explore approaches to parallel programming. A Microsoft researcher called BEE3 "a Swiss Army knife of computer research tools."

Comments

"stuck with a ...serial programming model"

[BadAnalogyGuy]

It's a little disingenuous to claim that programmers are "stuck" with a serial programming model. The fact of the matter is that multi-threaded programming is a common paradigm which takes advantage of multiple cores just fine. Additionally, many algorithms cannot be parallelized.

Even languages like Erlang which bring parallelization right to the front of the language are still stuck running serial operations serially. There is sometimes no way around doing something sequentially.

Now, can we blow a few cycles on a few cores trying to predict which operations will get executed next? Yeah, sure, but that's not a programming problem, it's a hardware design problem.

Re:"stuck with a ...serial programming model"

[gdgib]

ParLab is so not about branch predictors and out-of-order execution. As you say, that's a hardware design problem and a solved one at that. Boring.

While I'll agree that not all programmers are stuck with the serial programming model, threads aren't exactly a great solution (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.html). They're heavyweight and inefficient compared to running most algorithms on e.g. bare hardware or even an FPGA. Plus they deal badly with embarrasing parallelism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel). And finally they are HARD to use, the programmer must explicitly manage the parallelism by creating, synchronizing and destroying threads.

Setting aside those problems which exhibit no parallelism (for whom there is no solution but a faster CPU really), there are many classes of problems which would benefit enormously from better programming models, which are more efficiently tied to the operating system and hardware rather than going through an OS level threading package.

Re:"stuck with a ...serial programming model"

[robizzle]

You are right, programmers aren't currently "stuck" with a serial programming model; however, looking into the future it is pretty clear that the hardware is developing faster than the programming models. Systems with dozens and dozens of cores aren't far off but we really don't have a good way to take advantage of all the cores.

In the very near future, we could potentially have systems with hundreds of cores that sit idle all the time because none of the software takes advantage of much more than 5-10 cores. Of course, this would never actually happen, because once the hardware manufacturers notice this to be a problem, they will stop increasing the number of cores and try to make some other changes that would result in increased performance to the end user. There will always be a bottleneck -- either the software paradigms or the hardware and right now it looks like in the near future it will be the software.

Yes, there are some algorithms that no matter what you do have to be executed sequentially. However, there is a huge truckload of algorithms that can be rewritten, with little added complexity, to take advantage of parallel computing. Furthermore, there is a slew of algorithms that could be rewritten with a slight loss in efficiency to be parallelized but with a net gain in performance. This third type of algorithm is what I think the most interesting is for researchers -- Even though parallelizing the algorithm may introduce redundant calculations or added work, the increased number of workers outweighs this.

In other words, what is more efficient: 1 core that performs 20,000 instructions in 1 second or 5 cores that each perform 7,000 instructions, in parallel, in 0.35 seconds. Perhaps surprisingly to you, the single core is more efficient (20,000 instructions instead of 7,000*5 = 35,000 instructions) -- BUT, if we have the extra 4 cores sitting around doing nothing anyways, we may as well introduce inefficiency and finish the algorithm about 2.9 times faster.

Re:1000 cores?

[rthille]

The point of the Berkeley program is to come up with toolsets so you don't have to "juggle 1000 cores in your head". Instead, you describe, using the toolset, the problem in a way which is decomposable, and the tools spread the work over the 1000+ cores. No more worrying if you incremented that semaphore correctly because you're operating at a much higher level.

Real Information

[gdgib]

The real websites are:
ParLab (what's being funded): http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/
RAMP (the people who are building the architectural simulators for ParLab): http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/
BEE2 (the precursor to the not-quite-so-microsoft BEE3): http://bee2.eecs.berkeley.edu/

The funding being announced here is for ParLab whose mission is to "solve the parallel programming problem". Basically they want to design new architectures, operating systems and languages. And before you get all "we tried that an it didn't work" there are some genuinely new ideas here and the wherewithall to make them work. ParLab grew out of the Berkeley View report (http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/) which was the work of very large group of people to standardize on the same language and figure out what the problems in parallel computing were. This included everyone from architecture to applications (e.g. the music department).

RAMP is a multi-university group working to build architectural simulators in FPGAs. In fact you can go download one such system right now called RAMP Blue (http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/index.php?downloads). With ParLab starting up there will be another project RAMP Gold which will build a similar simulator but specifically designed for the architectures ParLab will be experimenting with.

As a side note, keep in mind when you read articles like this that statements like the "Microsoft BEE3" are amusing when you take in to account that "B.E.E." standards for Berkeley Emulation Engine. Microsoft did a lot of the work and did a good job of it, but still...

Re:cool

[MightyYar]

They are actually trying to model hell on earth. Microsoft provides the evil and Intel the heat.

(Okay, the joke would have worked better in the P4 days.)

Re:Why 1000 ?

[gdgib]

Actually RAMP Blue (the precursor to what ParLab used) had 1008. Good times. ahref=http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/index.php?picturesrel=url2html-8126http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/index.php?pictures>

Basically 1000 is the goal, anything over that is a bonus. And yes, we like powers of 2 as much as you.

Re:1000 cores?

[Anonymous Coward]

640 Cores should be enough for anybody.

Cheap Bastards.

[cyc]

Rick Merritt, who wrote the lead article also posted an opinion piece in EE Times lambasting Wintel for their lackluster funding efforts in parallel programming. I thoroughly agree with this guy. To quote:

Wintel should not just tease multiple researchers with a $10 million grant awarded to one institution. They need to significantly up the ante and fund multiple efforts.

Ten million is a drop in the bucket of the R&D budgets at Intel and Microsoft. You have to wonder about who is piloting the ship in Redmond these days when the company can afford a $44 billion bid for Yahoo to try to bolster its position in Web search but only spends $10 million to attack a needed breakthrough to save its core Windows business.

Use your GPU

[TheSync]

If you have a GeForce 8800 GT, you already have a 112 processor parallel computer that you can program using CUDA.

Parallel Computing is not magic

[technienerd]

I'm about to start a graduate degree in this area so I'm a little biased. However, I think a lot of problems can be solved in parallel. For example, maybe, LZW compression as it's implemented in the "zip" format might not be easily parallelizable but that doesn't prevent us from developing a compression algorithm with parallelism in mind. I did some undergraduate research in parallel search algorithms and I know for a fact that there are many, many ways you can parallelize search. Frankly, saying that you can't parallelize algorithms is a bit closed minded. Many problems don't inherently require serial solutions, it's just current algorithms handle them that way. Rather than trying to implement existing algorithms on a massively parallel processor, you want to re-tackle the problem under a new model, a model of an arbitrary number of processors. You build around the idea of data-parallelism rather than task-parallelism. Many, many things are possible under this model and I think it's naive to think otherwise. You don't need to think, how do I juggle 1000 threads around, you think, how do I take a problem, break it up into arbitrarily many chunks and distribute those chunks to an arbitrary number of processors and how do I do all that scheduling efficiently? This model doesn't work for interactive tasks mind you (where you're waiting for user input), but I'm very confident a model can be developed that can.