How Virtualized Symmetric Multiprocessing will ease MIC Transition

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Over at GeekNet, R. Colin Johnson writes that while the new Intel MIC architecture poses some parallel programming challenges, Intel is working with ScaleMP to make this transition nearly painless.

ScaleMP already offers its Versatile Symmetric Multi-Processing (vSMP) to users who want to turn multiple x86 servers into a single virtual machine (VM), and has pledged that it will have adapted vSMP to Intel’s massively parallel Xeon Phi when it is introduced this fall. By installing ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation below the operating system on the Xeon E5 host system, into which a Xeon Phi card is plugged, programmers can treat the whole system as if it were a single symmetric multi-processor. “We give programmers transparent access to all of the cores and memory in an Intel MIC regardless of how many Xeon E5s and Xeon Phi’s are installed in it,” says ScaleMP chief executive officer Shai Fultheim. “And all the code they have already written for multicore Xeons will run on the new coprocessor-based MIC architecture without alteration.”

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