Intel senior software engineer Gary Carleton returns for this week's featured video to again discuss Intel's software development tools, this time demonstrating the Intel Thread Profiler and the Thread Building Blocks.

With the Intel Thread Profiler, developers can see lock transitions for a program and when threads are active on a particular core. Carleton explained, "You can kind of get a sense of how much lock thrashing or lock activity is occurring and maybe get a visual look at how much synchronization overhead is occurring with the application."

Developers can also click on a particular thread transition to look at the source code for both the thread releasing the lock and the thread acquiring the lock. That way, they can examine the code if they feel that there's too much lock activity occurring.

Said Carleton, "The goal is to measure the amount of parallelization of the system [to see if we] are in fact using all the execution cores in the system, and then to be able to drill down into more detail as to how the threads are interacting."