Tutorial 4: Multicores: Architectures, Programming and Beyond

Most vendors have realized that multicores is probably the best bet to meet increasing transistor densities with scalable performance and with a reasonable control on power. The community is almost unanimous in the view that effective programming of these machines requires domain knowledge in parallel architectures, parallel programming as well as multithreaded programming. In this tutorial we begin by describing the architectural issues in multicore architectures. Clearly the power/performance advantage of these architectures can only be exploited if we have both parallel applications (workloads) and "efficient" parallel programming techniques. We will review current techniques and also provide pointers towards "promising" research directions. We will also describe transactional memory, a method that brings the idea of database transactions for programming these massive compute engines.