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→Vectorization Advisor
== Introduction ==
[https://software.intel.com/en-us/advisor Intel Advisor] is software tool that you can use to help you add multithreading to your applicatin application or parts of your application without disrupting your normal software development. Not only can you use it add multithreading to your application, it can be used to determine whether the performance improvements that come with multithreading are worth adding when you consider the costs associated with multithreading such as maintainability, more difficult to debug, and the effort with refactoring or reorganizing your code to resolve data dependencies.
It is also a tool that can help you add vectorization to your program or to improve the efficiency of code that is already vectorized.
Intel Advisor is bundled with [https://software.intel.com/en-us/parallel-studio-xe Intel Parallel Studio].
Intel Advisor is separated into two workflows Vectorization Advisor and Threading Advisor.
= Vectorization Advisor =
The Vectorization Advisor is a tool for optimizing your code through vectorization. This tool will help identify loops that are high-impact and under-optimized, It also reports on what blocking loops from being vectorized and details on where it is safe to ignore the compiler's warnings and force vectorization. Finally it offers in-line code specific recommendations on how to fix these issues.
== Roofline Analysis ==
Roofline charts provide a visual analysis of the performance ceiling imposed on your program given the hard-ware of your computer. This provides an entry point for optimization highlighting loops that are having the most impact on performance and loops with the most room for improvement.
The key use of roofline analysis is to profile an application and display if it is optimized for the hard-ware it's running on.
Roofline analysis allows us to tackle 2 key points:
* What are the bottlenecks limiting performance?
* what loops are inhibiting performance the most?
[[File:Roofline-Chart-Example.png]]
== Survey Report ==
Provides code-specific recommendations for fixing vectorization issues. This allows the programmer to solve these issues providing three key points of information:
* Where in the code would vectorization be the most impactful.
* How you can further improve vectorized loops.
* Which loops are not vectorized and information on how they can be.
[[File:Survey-Report-Example.png]]
=== Trip Count and FLOPS Analysis ===
Complementing the survey reports trip count and FLOPS analysis provides in-line messages that allow you to make better decisions on how to improve individual loops. These messages include:
* Number of time the loop iterates.
* Data about FLOPS (Floating point Operations Per Second).
[[File:In-Line-Analysis-Example.png]]
After Identifying what loops benefit the most from vectorization you can simple select them individually to run more detailed report on them.
== Data Dependencies Report ==
Compilers may fail to vectorize loops due to potential data dependencies. This feature collects all the error messages from the compiler and creates a report for the programmer. The report allow the programmer to discern for themselves if these data dependencies actually exist and whether or not to force the compiler to ignore the error and vectorize the loop anyways. If the data dependencies really do exist the report provides information on the type of dependency and how to resolve the issue.
[[File:Data-Dependency-Example.png]]
= Threading Advisor =
The Threading Advisor tool is used to model, tune, and test the performance of various multi threading designs such as OpenMP, Threading Building Blocks (TBB), and Microsoft Task Parallel Library (TPL) without the hindering the development of the project. The tool accomplishes this by helping you with prototyping thread options, testing scalability of the project for larger systems, and optimizing faster. It will also help identify issues before implementing parallelization like eliminating data-sharing issues during design. The tool is primarily used for adding threading to the C, C++, C#, and Fotran languages.
== Annotations ==
Annotations can be inserted into your code to help design the potential parallelization for analysis. This way of designing multi threading prevents early error in the code's design to build up and cause slower performance then expected. This does not impact the design of your current code as the compiler ignores the annotations (they're only there to help model your design). This provides you with the ability to keep your code serial and prevents the bugs that can come from multiple threading while in your design phase.
[[File:Annotation-Example.jpg]]
== Scalability Analysis ==
Enables the evaluation of the performance and scalability of the various threading designs. The evaluation of the number of CPU's versus the Grain-size provides an easy to follow results on the impact of the common bottle necks found in all multi threading code when attempting to scale up a project without the need to test it on multiple high end machines yourself.
[[File:Scalabilty-Analysis-Example.png]]
== Dependencies Report ==
The threading advisor's dependencies report works similar to the vectorization's. It will provide information on the data dependency errors a programmer encounters when parallelizing code including data-sharing, deadlocks, and races. The report also displays code snippets it finds is related to the dependency errors you can then follow these code snippets to their exact location and begin handling the errors on a case by case basis.
= Work Flow =
With these two tool we can start to come up with a work flow for optimizing our code.
[[File:Work-Flow-Example.png]]
= Vectorization =
