July 8, 2008

More TBB Help

Blogger Dave Vanden Bout (whose article currently appears on this portal) has been covering multi-core programming in a blog of his own entitled Parallel Panorama. He offers a useful table of contents for his TBB-related articles, reproduced here for your convenience.

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Posted by Alexandra Weber Morales on 5:53 PM | TrackBack (0)

July 7, 2008

Knuth's Rant

In an April 2008 interview on InformIT, Donald Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University, spoke with Andrew Binstock about various programming topics. While not central to the interview, his digression about multi-core programming is worth repeating in this space, although it disappointed many a reader who expected more from the father of open-source.

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June 30, 2008

Can Apple Make Concurrency Fruitful for Developers?

Though there are as of yet no detailed explanations, Apple made grand claims on June 9, 2008 for its Mac OS X Snow Leopard, scheduled to ship in about a year. According to a press release, "Snow Leopard delivers unrivaled support for multi-core processors with a new technology code-namedGrand Central, making it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs." There has been some speculation that Grand Central may be a rival to TBB, or similar to Microsoft's Task Parallel Library for managed code. Though there are bound to be squabbles over the best implementation, it's clear that more entries into the fertile field of multi-threading tools bode well for the technology's future. Given the market evidence, it's getting harder and harder for developers to wait out concurrency from the safety of their serial programming bunkers...

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More on TBB's parallel_reduce

From the horse's mouth... We're about to publish another Featured Algorithm article describing a real-world developer's experience with Intel Threading Building Blocks. Casting about for some more examples, I came across this excellent blog by Michael Voss, Observations from Parallel Sorting Part I: the subtleties of tbb::parallel_reduce.

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June 27, 2008

Multi-core on YouTube

There are a plethora of multi-core and concurrent programming videos available on YouTube. Check out this Intel Second Life Summit on Multi-core and Software, in which experts from Intel, Microsoft and Dr. Dobbs journal hold a Second Life discussion on what software developers must do to take advantage of the new generation of multi-core computers.

Speakers include:
James Reinders, Chief Evangelist and Threading Guru for Intel Software Products
Tim Mattson, Intel Principal Engineer and developer of OpenMP
Herb Sutter, Architect, Microsoft, and chair of the ISO C++ Standards committee
Jonathan Erickson, Editorial Director, Dr. Dobb's, CMP Technology
Check out full video at http://slcn.tv/programs/intel

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June 4, 2008

Gates Gets Concurrent

From Bill Gates' Microsoft Tech-Ed 2008 keynote speech yesterday in Orlando, Fla. (his last as full-time chairman of Microsoft):

"Looming after that, though, is an even more interesting challenge, which is the clock speed will not increase at the same rate it has over the last 30 years. It will largely stay the same, and the additional performance will come from having multiple execution units. And so the need to take programs and break them down into parallel execution units now becomes absolutely necessary to get the benefit of the exponential increase in transistors. We have an incredible amount of work at Microsoft to make the runtimes higher level, and to make it easy to take your code and write it in this parallel fashion. There will be a lot of discussion about this so-called 'multi-core' revolution in how we make sure we're all doing the best to take advantage of that."

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May 31, 2008

Does Rent-a-Core Make Sense?

In a future hinted at by Intel's teraflop prototype processor, will usage-based pricing schemes allow customers and manufacturers to share in the multi-core wealth? That's the vision of Joseph Sloan and Rakesh Kumar, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their paper, "Hardware/System Support for Four Economic Models for Many Core Computing," proposes four related economic models for the many-core landscape.

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Posted by Alexandra Weber Morales on 4:29 PM | TrackBack (0)

May 22, 2008

Better Than a Sharp Stick

While cruising for the latest concurrency news, I came across a tool that isn't exactly new -- it's been around for 19 years -- but that's getting renewed attention beyond its niche in the high performance computing world: The TotalView Debugger. This eponymous product from TotalView Technologies in Natick, MA, targets advanced apps that perform such tasks as weather prediction, film special effects and animation, oil and gas exploration, CAD/CAM, aerospace and telecommunications

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May 13, 2008

A Spectrum of Developer Opinion

This recent InfoWorld article ("Multi-core to leave developers in dust?" by columnist Bill Snyder) is somewhat late in reacting to the concurrency hype, though it provides a good overview of recent market maneuvers among chip makers and ISVs. However, it's worth reading for the comments alone. While there are only a dozen or so, they truly scatter across the spectrum of developer opinion about concurrency, from complete apathy to shoulder-shrugging mastery, anachronistic irony to futuristic fear. Read them and ponder...

Posted by Alexandra Weber Morales on 8:13 PM | TrackBack (0)

May 5, 2008

Can Google Make Concurrency Commonplace?

With the April 7, 2008 preview release of Google App Engine, a new legion of Web developers may rethink their let-them-eat-cake take on concurrency. Google App Engine is a novel developer tool for building and running scalable web applications on Google's infrastructure. But this ain't a free lunch, folks.

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Posted by Alexandra Weber Morales on 6:25 PM | TrackBack (0)