Threading Your Application

Tachyon is a parallel raytracer / renderer used in combination with the Intel® C++ Compiler Tutorial "Threading Your Application" on using different threading technologies. The tutorial in this package shows how to thread an application step-by-step.

Tachyon is a 2-D raytracer/renderer that visually shows different parallel scheduling methods and their resulting speedup. The code was parallelized by speculating that each pixel could be rendered in parallel. Minimal synchronization was inserted into the parallel code. The resulting parallel code, using either OpenMP* or Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) exhibits good speedup.

The following versions of the example are provided:

serial:
- Original sequential version.
openmp: Parallel version that uses OpenMP* and an omp parallel for to parallelize over tasks that are rectangular sub-areas.
- By default, this version uses one thread per available processor. To change this default, set the OMP_NUM_THREADS environment variable to the desired number of threads before running.
tbb: Parallel version that uses Intel® TBB and blocked_range2d to parallelize over tasks that are rectangular sub-areas.
- By default, this version uses one thread per available processor. To change this default, set the TBB_NUM_THREADS environment variable to the desired number of threads before running.
- This version uses a reasonable task grain size by default. To change this default, set the TBB_GRAINSIZE environment variable to the desired grain size before running. The grain size corresponds to the number of pixels (in the X or Y direction, for a rectangular sub-area) in each parallel task.

System Requirements:

Hardware:
- Any Intel® processor like 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i3, i5, or i7 processors and Intel® Xeon® E3 or E5 processor family
For Microsoft* Windows*:
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2013*, 2015* or 2017* Professional Edition or above
- Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2019 Composer Edition for C++ Windows* or newer
  or
  Intel® System Studio 2019 for Windows* Composer Edition or newer
For Linux*:
- GNU* GCC 4.5 or newer
- Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2019 Composer Edition for C++ Linux* or newer
  or
  Intel® System Studio 2018 Composer Edition or newer
For macOS*:
- macOS* 10.12 or above
- Xcode* 8.x or above
- Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2019 Composer Edition for C++ macOS or newer

For Microsoft Visual Studio* users:

To Compile All of the Projects in the Solution

Click Build > Rebuild Solution

To Compile a Project in the Solution

Right-click the project in Solution Explorer and then click Rebuild

To Run a Project in the Solution

Right-click the project in Solution Explorer and then click Set as Startup Project
Click Debug > Start Without Debugging and then click Yes in the resulting dialog

To Debug a Project in the Solution

Set a breakpoint in the source code.
Click Debug > Start Debugging and then click Yes in the resulting dialog

For Microsoft Windows* Command Line users:

Enable your particular compiler environment for the Intel® C++ Compiler:

To Compile all configurations

Run build.bat
- The resulting sample executables are placed in the tachyon_release directory.
To Compile all configurations' solutions
- Run build.bat solution
  - The resulting sample executables are placed in the tachyon_release directory.
  To Run
  - Run tachyon.*keyword* where keyword is the version of the sample as described at the top (either serial, openmp, or tbb).

For Linux* or macOS* command-line users:

Enable your particular compiler environment for the Intel® C++ Compiler:

To Build:

Run make [config] where config is one of the following:

all, serial, openmp, tbb

make solution

To Run

Run tachyon.*keyword* where keyword is the version of the sample as described at the top (either serial, openmp, or tbb).

To Debug

For macOS* Xcode* users:

To Compile a Scheme in the Solution

Select the appropriate scheme from tachyon.*keyword* where keyword is the version of the sample as described at the top (either serial, openmp, or tbb). Then click Product->Build

To Run the Scheme

Click Product->Run

To Debug the Scheme

Set a breakpoint in the source code using Debug->Activate Breakpoints.
Click Debug >Product->Run.

Go To Threading Your Application tutorial (English language)

Go To Threading Your Application tutorial (Japanese language)

This example includes software developed by John E. Stone. See here for license information.

Threading Your Application - Tachyon

To Compile All of the Projects in the Solution

To Compile a Project in the Solution

To Run a Project in the Solution

To Debug a Project in the Solution

To Compile all configurations

To Compile all configurations' solutions

To Run

To Build:

To Run

To Debug

To Compile a Scheme in the Solution

To Run the Scheme

To Debug the Scheme

Go To Threading Your Application tutorial (English language)

Go To Threading Your Application tutorial (Japanese language)