Summer School for Parallel Programming at University of Illinois U-C.

I spent a week in late June 2009 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign&aposs Universal Parallel Computing Research Center Summer School for Multicore Programming. The UPCRC team produced a top notch event that immersed all of the participants in the fundamental of parallel programing.

UPCRC Co-Director Marc Snir kicked it off with an Introduction to Parallelism. His broad overview touched on many of the classic issues and opportunities facing all developers as they refactor their sequential code (refactoring is the process of changing the structure of an application with changing its external function).

Professor Snir stressed that we need to write applications that scale and address the nasty issue that arise from multiple processor using shared memory.  He presented the three programming levels and the pros and cons of each approach:

• Do it yourself (Pthreads & POSIX threads)
• Framework for parallel tasks (Java parallel framework, Threading building blocks (C++), C# TPL)
• Parallel Languages (Java, C#, OpenMP, Ct)

Professor Danny Dig then covered the topic of Parallelism with Java and Code Refactoring.

Dr. Clay "Master of the Parallel Universe" Breshears introduced the class to OpenMP & Intel Threading Building Blocks. Both of his talked centered on shared memory control with each of the frameworks.

Dr. David Padua presented Data Parallelism and Implicit Parallelism.

UPCRC Co-Director Wen-mei Hwu presented an over view of CUDA.

Dr. Snir then reviewed and compared the programming models presented and discussed mechanisms for implementing a parallel programming model. He also covered desired features in parallel programming models. The class then joined in a discussion of how features of applications and of parallel architecture influence the choice of model.

UPCRC sponsors Intel & Microsoft both presented research and products in development.

Bob Kuhn, Intel Software Product Engineer, discussed Intel Parallel Studio and processor technology roadmap. Daniel Moth presented the recently beta released of Visual Studio 2010 and demonstrated the newest C# libraries and code/memory/processor analysis tools.

One of the best parts of the program was the hands on lab time. All of the students engaged in labs using Java, OpenMP, TBB, CUDA & Ct with lecturers and teaching assistants close by to guild students through any issue or technical gap. Each of the labs started after the topic lecture and many students took advantage of after dinner lab hours to complete each of the assignment. It had been a while since I spent an evening in the lab debugging code. It kind of make me nostalgic for those bitter sweet college days.

In addition to the great learnings it was also a great opportunity to meet and learn from all the class participants. The whole class shared breakfast, lunch and dinner together for the whole week and spent Thursday evening at the University of Illinois Student Union relaxing over billiards & bowling.

It has been a few weeks since the program concluded and I&aposve had some time to reflect upon my experience. Kudos to the entire UPCRC team most especially Mark Smith, Cheri Helregel, & Andrea Whitesell who made all of the participants feel comfortable, engaged, well feed and focused on the learning.

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/IntelBlogs/~3/kh9CQ9qIkMc/

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Import and Export

In the coming few days I&aposm going to be looking at some of the continuous integration capabilities in the current version of Team Foundation Server. I have been using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtualization for some time to explorer capabilities in existing software along with beta software and so I began by creating a new virtual machine for the Team Foundation Server.

Using Windows Server 2008 SP2 as both the host and virtualized operating systems I configured the virtual machine with SQL Server 2008 SP1 and Team Foundation Server SP1.

With the Hyper-V virtual machine created it was time to export the virtual machine on my workstation such that I can import the virtual machine on my laptop.

Once the virtual machine has been shutdown and is no longer running you can right click on the virtual machine and select the Export… menu. You&aposll then be presented with the Export Virtual Machine dialog as shown here.

You should provide an export path and leave the Export only the virtual machine configuration checkbox unchecked. Once the export is complete you can backup the virtual machine or copy it to another Windows Server 2008 machine where it can be imported.

With the exported virtual machine copied to the destination machine the Import Virtual Machine… link on the Actions pane is then used to bring the virtual machine into the new Hyper-V environment.

You&aposll then need to browse to the import path containing the Snapshots, Virtual Hard Disks, and Virtual Machines folders along with the config.xml for the previously exported virtual machine.

Within Hyper-V all virtual machines have unique ID&aposs assigned to them so that the names of the virtual machines do not need to be unique themselves although it is good practice to keep them unique. We&aposll leave the Reuse old virtual machine ID&aposs checkbox unchecked and then Import the virtual machine.

Once the import is completed you&aposll see the virtual machine listed in the Hyper-V Manager and you&aposll be able to run the virtual machine as shown here. It is worth noting that the original virtual machine was setup on a quad-core extreme edition machine with 8Gb of memory and the destination machine is a dual-core machine with only 4Gb of memory.

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/IntelBlogs/~3/I08L_tJFxcQ/

07/08/2009: Vizioncore ships virtual backup and recovery tool

The new version of Vizioncore’s flagship backup package for virtual machines has exited its beta programme and is now available on general release.

URL: http://www.techworld.com/virtualisation/news/index.cfm?newsID=118833&pagtype=all