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Posts from Robert Reed (Intel) RSS

Hi, I'm a old software guy currently employed as a technical consulting engineer for such Intel products as Intel® Threading Building Blocks and thread analysis tools like Intel® Thread Profiler and Intel® Thread Checker. I come from a graphics background, a regular SIGGRAPH attendee who cut my teeth on programming and graphics at Tektronix. I like tinkering with code and hope to share some of my explorations with the community. When I'm not engineering, I like to dress funny and sing madrigals and drinking songs.

Under the hood: Employing hooks to explore TBB task scheduler

By Robert Reed (Intel) (9 posts) on June 16, 2008 at 11:10 am
Comments (1)

On a quest to understand the TBB scheduler and how it might be used to schedule tasks with order dependencies (i.e., a place where you’d like to block access to an object until it can get built), I’ve been building up tools to take a peek.  Last time I showed a technique to use thread [...]

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Category: Multicore, Open Source, Threading Building Blocks

Under the hood: Building hooks to explore TBB task scheduler

By Robert Reed (Intel) (9 posts) on May 19, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Comments (4)

Little did I suspect as I was introducing the topic of blocking in parallel computation in my last post that it would generate such interest, even though it seemed a common problem I’d been working on privately with several Intel customers.  Charles Leiserson amplified the pitfalls of employing blocking in a multi-threaded architecture and offered [...]

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Category: Multicore, Threading Building Blocks

Under the hood: Learning more about task scheduling

By Robert Reed (Intel) (9 posts) on May 6, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Comments (12)

I’m back with another challenge, encountered during my support work for Intel® Threading Building Blocks.  I’ve been working with several TBB users who appreciate the general philosophy of Cilk task scheduling embodied in TBB but have run into some practical challenges applying it to their applications.  Often the issue revolves around the need to block [...]

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Category: Multicore, Threading Building Blocks

Under the hood: count_strings

By Robert Reed (Intel) (9 posts) on February 24, 2008 at 12:47 am
Comments (0)

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to play, but I’ve been curious what I might discover by applying Intel® Thread Profiler with user events to other TBB structures besides pipelines. I tried checking out Conway’s Game of Life but the source download page wouldn’t reveal its sourcey goodness, so I moved onto [...]

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Category: Threading Building Blocks

Overlapping I/O and processing in a TBB pipeline, final(ly)

By Robert Reed (Intel) (9 posts) on October 26, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Comments (2)

Concluding the series on I/O pipeline flow, we show an additional parameter change and the analysis that led to it, resulting in a near linear scaling of this test code out to 8 processors.

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Category: Threading Building Blocks

Overlapping I/O and processing in a TBB pipeline, part 2

By Robert Reed (Intel) (9 posts) on August 28, 2007 at 11:34 am
Comments (3)

Last time I showed what happened when I tried to run a parallel I/O prototype using the TBB pipeline construct: Since the green patches indicate doing work and the green stripy ones are just spinning, this represents very poor parallel performance. Using the regular facilities of Intel® Thread Profiler, I can zero in on one of [...]

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Category: Threading Building Blocks

Overlapping I/O and processing in a pipeline

By Robert Reed (Intel) (9 posts) on August 23, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Comments (3)

I've been experimenting with TBB pipelines as a means to overlap I/O and processing on a multi-core system, trying to understand how they work.  Having a copy of Intel® Thread Profiler has been a wonderful aid to understand what is going on, but there's some tricks I learned to use that add even more power [...]

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Category: Threading Building Blocks

Scale testing

By Robert Reed (Intel) (9 posts) on August 3, 2007 at 2:51 am
Comments (0)

Whew! I just finished teaching a two-day class in parallel programming on Linux which was also a first attempt to use dual-core laptops with simultaneous Linux and Windows partitions operating under a virtual monitor. Lots of challenges, things that almost worked or just didn't. But the students were great and we had a good time. And I managed [...]

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Category: Threading Building Blocks

Another voice on TBB

By Robert Reed (Intel) (9 posts) on July 27, 2007 at 8:20 pm
Comments (3)

Thanks, Kevin, for leading the way in this budding Threading Building Blocks community with your prolific posts.  Now that the responsibilities of OSCON have passed, I hope to follow in his example to explore and share my discoveries about Threading Building Blocks.  I work as a technical consulting engineer at Intel, one of the people [...]

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Category: Threading Building Blocks