Yesterday Intel announced that it has started shipping its Parallel Studio development suite. Parallel Studio is a companion toolset aimed at supporting C and C++ developers; the product integrates into Microsoft’s Visual Studio development platform on Windows machines.

Parallel Studio is aimed at multicore developers who intend to stay within the shared memory confines of a single machine. Of course by next year those confines will get pretty roomy as Nehalem-EX allows 64-core machines.

The initial version of Parallel Studio has three tools to help developers: Parallel Composer for development, Parallel Inspector (threading error checking and a thread-safe memory checker), and Parallel Amplifier (tuning). Intel’s Parallel Advisor Lite is available as a free download from WhatIf.Intel.com. Advisor is a very interesting, and ambitious, product that looks at your code and tries to make recommendations about where you can gainfully add parallelism to your code. The “lite” designator — and free download — indicate it is still very much a work in progress. You can find out much more about Parallel Studio at Intel’s product web site; the suite is available individually, or as a bundle street priced at $799.

I wrote in detail about Parallel Studio for HPCwire last August; look for an update to that feature at HPCwire later this week.