Parallelaware http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/ 2008-07-08T17:53:27-05:00 More TBB Help http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/07/more-tbb-help.html 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.
]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-07-08T17:53:27-05:00 Knuth's Rant http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/07/knuths-rant.html 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.

]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-07-07T15:27:10-05:00 Can Apple Make Concurrency Fruitful for Developers? http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/06/can-apple-make.html 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... Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-06-30T16:59:49-05:00 More on TBB's parallel_reduce http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/06/more-on-tbbs-pa.html Observations from Parallel Sorting Part I: the subtleties of tbb::parallel_reduce. ]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-06-30T16:37:19-05:00 Multi-core on YouTube http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/06/multicore-on-yo.html xperts 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 ]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-06-27T14:03:37-05:00 Gates Gets Concurrent http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/06/gates-gets-conc.html 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."]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-06-04T13:32:03-05:00 Does Rent-a-Core Make Sense? http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/05/does-rentacore.html Hardware/System Support for Four Economic Models for Many Core Computing," proposes four related economic models for the many-core landscape. ]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-05-31T16:29:14-05:00 Better Than a Sharp Stick http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/05/better-than-a-s.html 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 Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-05-22T17:30:00-05:00 A Spectrum of Developer Opinion http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/05/a-spectrum-of-d.html Read them and ponder...
]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-05-13T20:13:57-05:00 Can Google Make Concurrency Commonplace? http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/05/can-google-make.html 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. ]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-05-05T18:25:34-05:00 Blogorriffic: Jeff Atwood vs. Herb Sutter http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/04/blogorriffic-je.html

]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-04-29T18:05:05-05:00 Concurrency on the Web: Responses http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/04/concurrency-on.html Yesterday's interview with a web developer who is unconvinced that concurrency is a pressing concern yielded these responses from Intel's James Reinders and Mohammad Haghighat:

]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-04-24T19:23:36-05:00 Q&A: Some Say It Ain't So http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/04/qa-some-say-it.html blogger and Django Developer at GCap Media, Tomasz Wegrzanowski. While Wegrzanowski has written in the past about his experience writing parallelism into an improbable language (Perl), he's unabashedly unconvinced that the concurrency revolution is anything more than hype. Read on for his perspective:

]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-04-23T14:02:14-05:00 Joe Duffy on Concurrent Code Inspections http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/04/joe-duffy-on-co.html It's been 20 years since the concept of source code inspection came into the software development mainstream, and 10 to 15 years since object-oriented code reviews were introduced. In yet another reassuring sign of practical approaches to concurrency, Microsoft blogger Joe Duffy explains how to take a parallel lens to your source before committing it to the codebase. Concurrency, meet agility!

]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-04-08T20:17:37-05:00 Concurrency at SD West: Brian Goetz http://blog.devx.com/go-parallel/blog/2008/03/concurrency-at-2.html At the recent SD West conference in Santa Clara, CA, concurrency was just barely on the agenda -- but if you were a programmer already on the path to parallelism, there were a few tips ripe for the picking.

Brian Goetz has been writing about concurrency for a while: Witness his Jolt-award-winning Java Concurrency in Action (Addison Wesley, 2006). Though he offered plenty of detail for Java junkies at SD West, I found myself grateful for his succinct and memorable metaphor for Amdahl's law:

"Harvesting crops can be sped up with more workers, but additional workers will not make them grow any faster. If you have 50% serialization in your program, the best speedup you'll get via concurrency is a factor of two, no matter how many processors you have," he said at his conference talk on Java concurrency.

]]> Alexandra Weber Morales 2008-03-11T13:13:14-05:00