Development of Resource-intensive Applications in Visual C++
by Andrey Karpov, Evgeniy Ryzhkov

Contents   Introduction   Page 1   Page 2   Page 3   Page 4   Page 5   Conclusion   Printable version   Discuss this article

Table of Contents

Page 1: Be brave to use parallelism and 64-bit technology
Page 2: Provide yourself with good hardware
Page 3: Use a logging system instead of a debugger
Page 4: The use of right data types from the viewpoint of 64-bit technologies
page 5: Additional ways of increasing productivity of program systems

Annotation

The article will familiarize developers of application software with tasks set before them with the mass introduction of 64-bit multi-core processors symbolizing revolutionary increase of computing power available for an average user. It will also touch upon the problems of effective use of hardware resources for solving everyday applied tasks within the limits of Windows x64 operating system.

Information for readers

On default by operating system in the article Windows is meant. By 64-bit systems x86-64 (AMD64) architecture is understood. By the development environment – Visual Studio 2005/2008. You may download demo sample which will be touched upon in the article from this address: http://www.Viva64.com/articles/testspeedexp.zip.

Introduction

Parallel computing and large RAM size are now available not only for large firmware complexes meant for large-scale scientific computing, but are being used also for solving everyday tasks related to work, study, entertainment and computer games.

The possibility of paralleling and large RAM size, on the one hand, make the development of resource-intensive applications easier, but on the other hand, demand more qualification and knowledge in the sphere of parallel programming from a programmer. Unfortunately, a lot of developers are far from possessing such qualification and knowledge. And this is not because they are bad developers but because they simply haven’t come across such tasks. This is of no surprise as creation of parallel systems of information processing has been until recently carried out mostly in scientific institutions while solving tasks of modeling and forecasting. Parallel computer complexes with large memory size were used also for solving applied tasks by enterprises, banks etc, but until recently they have been rather expensive and very few developers were able to get acquainted with the peculiarities of developing software for such systems.

The authors of the article managed to take part in the development of resource-intensive software products related to visualization and modeling of physical processes and to learn the specificity of development, testing and debugging of such systems by themselves. By resource-intensive software we mean program code which uses efficiently abilities of multiprocessor systems and large memory size (2GB and more). That’s why we’d like to bring some knowledge to developers who may find it useful while mastering modern parallel 64-bit systems in the nearest future.

It will be fair to mention that problems related to parallel programming have been studied in detail long ago and described in many books, articles and study courses. That’s why this article will devote most attention to the sphere of organizational and practical issues of developing high-performance applications and to the use of 64-bit technologies.

While talking about 64-bit systems we’ll consider that they use LLP64 data model (see table 1). It is this data model that is used in 64-bit versions of Windows operating system. But information given here may be as well useful while working with systems with a data model different from LLP64.

Table 1. Data models and their use in different operating systems.

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