"High-performance computing is transforming physics research," said Ralph Roskies, co-scientific director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), during a presentation on Friday, March 20, at the American Physical Society Meeting, held in Pittsburgh, March 16-20. "The Impact of NSF's TeraGrid on Physics Research" was the topic of his talk, which led off a panel of physicists who have made major strides in their work through the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation's cyberinfrastructure program. "These world-class facilities," said Roskies, "on a much larger scale than ever before, present major new opportunities for physics researchers to carry out computations that would have been infeasible just a few years ago."
As a software developer, you are faced with a range of options as you decide whether and how to modify your applications for parallel architectures. What approach should you adopt? How significantly should you alter applications? When should you say “no” to parallelism? Answering these questions requires not only technical expertise but also strategic thinking that evaluates the business benefits and costs. As you weigh your options, consider the suggestions below, which we’ve derived from our experiences at Intel working with software developers to optimize code.