Intel Corporation is announcing the launch of Intel^® Parallel Universe Portal (http://paralleluniverse.intel.com), a new cloud-based application scalability testing service. The analysis offered by this service helps with scaling — a key programming challenge for multicore processors.

This is important for developers in the development of scalable cloud ready apps.  Intel Software Group has been outreaching to developers lately on specific techniques in developing multicore applications as part of the Intel Software Network.  Intel’s focus has been in two main areas:  1) netbooks and 2) mobile.

The most common usage of this testing service will probably on portions of an application rather than entire applications. It is not intended for applications that require user interaction (such as a GUI application), and it is not for testing programs that run more than a few minutes. Instead, you’ll want to have the code you are working on, packaged into some sort of wrapper to drive it, and upload that. Of course, you can upload your entire application – if it can be driven from a command line, runs in less than a few minutes, and doesn’t require user interaction.

It’s great to see Intel offering resources to developers to address the scale issue.  As multicore becomes the norm having a cloud solution for testing and scaling is very important.

Powered by Intel^® Parallel Studio, software developers can use the browser based tool to get information about how well their application scales on multicore systems. Application scalability is a measure of how well application performance improves as the number of processor cores increase. There is currently no charge for this service; it is available online through the Intel Software Network at paralleluniverse.intel.com.

A Quick Overview of the New Intel Parallel Universe Portal

• Test software performance and scalability without having larger multicore systems in-house.  Upload your executable and review parallelism performance using only your browser.
• Cloud-based analysis at no charge.  Nothing to download or install – quick and easy.  Service provided over a trusted, internet connection.
• Get parallelism tuning guidance specific to your software.

Measure Application Scalability Without Requiring a Test System In-House

While quad-core processors are commonplace, it is less common to have a sixteen thread system available to test the scalability of a threaded application.  Intel Parallel Universe makes it easy for developers to find out how well their threaded application scales as the number of processing cores increase by testing on a system that is larger than most developers have access to otherwise. There is currently no charge for this service, which supports 32-bit Windows applications.

Easy to Use, Trusted, Browser Based Scalability Testing

There’s no special application build required, nothing to install, there’s not even any cost to run the test. Developers can use their favorite Internet browser including Internet Explorer*, Firefox*, Safari*, or Chrome* to run the test and interpret the results. Intel Parallel Universe uses a trusted, Internet connection provided by the Intel^® Software Network.  It is a straightforward three-step process to test the scalability of an application.

• Upload Zip file of application along with execution command & arguments.
• The application goes into queue.  Each test run gets the entire system resources for accurate scaling information.
• Scaling results are reported in easy to read tables and charts.  Save results for later analysis and comparison.

Best with Intel^® Parallel Studio

Any development tool can be used to build applications analyzed with this service; it is not required that Intel compilers or the Intel Parallel Studio be used to create the application. Intel Parallel Studio provides capabilities to tune and optimize applications to get the most accurate picture of the scaling potential of the program.  Evaluation copies of Intel Parallel Studio can be downloaded at http://intel.com/go/parallel.  Applications build with trial copies of Parallel Studio can be analyzed with the Intel Parallel Universe Portal.