1 A Study of the Usability of Multicore Threading Tools

The primary consequence of the transition to multicore processors is that applications will increasingly need to be parallelized to fully exploit the throughput gains now becoming available. Unfortunately, parallel programming is no doubt much more tedious and error-prone than serial programming. Software vendors have begun efforts to educate developers and provide them with better tools for multicore programming. But many of the tools available are still works in progress. This paper presents a preliminary study of the usability of the state-of-the-art threading tools for multicore programming. We report on our evaluation of the usability of two Intel threading tools: Intel Thread Profiler- a visual profiling tool for monitoring the parallelism gain of parallel applications and Intel Thread Checker- a sophisticated tool for finding potential deadlocks and data race conditions in a parallel code