EXOCHI as in EXO-Cha Cha Cha
admin
I’m sitting in the speaker ready room at Intel R&D day in Tokyo preparing for my talk in two hours. The subject of my talk is on the future plans of the Intel C++ Compiler with regards to programming for multi-core processors. I have the distinction of following after Matsumoto-san, the inventor of Ruby. Hopefully, I don’t disappoint.
One part of my talk that I find particularly compelling is research Intel is doing in heterogeneous multi-core programming using extensions to OpenMP, one of my favorite APIs for parallel programming. The power of OpenMP is ease of use. If you’ve never seen OpenMP… it is possible to transform a serial program into a parallel program with one OpenMP statement, or pragma.
The particular extension, called EXOCHI (pronounced X-O-Cha), extends OpenMP by adding clauses to support spawning threads (called shreds) on processors with different instruction set architectures. In effect, it is possible to have one piece of code that contains instructions for different types of processors. It is certainly possible to program for these coprocessors today with one code base through the use of libraries (Direct X is an example of such a library), however these approaches abstract away the low level hardware which is what some developers would like to access. In addition, EXOCHI enables virtual shared memory through hardware support which grants the nice properties of shared memory while limiting the performance penalties. Very powerful.
In two weeks, I’ll be participating on a panel at Design Automation Conference which will seek answers on why tools to aid with heterogeneous multi-core and multi-processor SOCs have not really caught on. My suspicion is a tool like EXOCHI may be just what is needed to lower the barrier for heterogeneous multi-core software development.
One more rehearsal of my talk before I go onstage, give the presentation, and then hopefully talk my colleagues into Kobe beef.
If you need a reference on EXOCHI, the paper can be found at,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1250734.1250753
Max
Posted on: Friday, May 30, 2008 at 2:18 am 
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