In my PDC Day 3 post I mentioned how impressed I was with the Parallel Computing session. Ryan, Richard, and I are still talking about some of the stuff we saw and learned in that session. Daniel was kind enough to mention in the comments that the video from his PDC talk is now online. If you weren’t able to attend PDC or you didn’t make it to the session this is a must see video!
I also noticed on Daniel’s blog that he posted links to a video of an interview he did about parallelism at Tech Ed EMEA . This interview is a nice compliment to the PDC session as it reiterates some of the important points of parallel computing such as what parallelism is (as opposed to just multi-threading) and why it’s so critical to understand how to leverage the power of multiple cores today given the prospect that 32+ core machines will be standard in the not too distant future.
It’s inevitable that parallelism will become a critical aspect of software development in the future and it’s nice to see Microsoft doing some great work in this area bringing such a vital (and complex) technology to the mainstream.
.NET, Programming
parallel programming, parallelism, PDC 2008, Programming, video
Here are some random notes from PDC day 3:
During the keynote I was pretty impressed with the Second Light demo. In the demo they held a surface (a piece of paper in this case) over the main surface computer and it “illuminated” additional information about the data being displayed on the bottom surface. So think of a map being displayed on the main surface and then holding a piece of paper over that surface and having street names appear, but only on the second surface. Hard to explain, but cool to see. Maybe I can dig up a video and provide a link later.
The parallel programming for managed code session was amazing! It was cool to see what they have added to the framework to support multiple core/cpu machines and how easy they have made it for developers to support these architectures. They have added a new feature called task which is a lightweight unit of work that can be queued up on a specific thread as to not overload the machine with memory allocation that can result form spinning up too many threads. The best part about the new support that they have added is that syntactically it is almost the same as how you currently create a thread.
I spent some time chatting with the Azure folks in the Big Room getting some info on how to get hooked up to the cloud and some of the plans that MS has for bringing this service to businesses. It was very informative and interesting to hear how they are going to take some of the more complex things that most companies have to tackle in terms of redundancy and reliability and to provide those in a cost effective way to customers. I also ran into an old friend Clemens who I haven’t seen since I was in Germany in 04. It was nice to catch up with him and hear him talk a little but about his passion for supporting the service bus in the cloud. Here is a picture of us together in the Azure lounge.
We also spent a little time in the MS Research booth talking to the Pex guys. They showed us a demo of pex and how it can be used to create unit tests for your code and how it can be used to get a more accurate view of your code’s quality. I was very impressed with what I saw and I am going to start using it right away. I am also going to attend the session tomorrow morning that will be doing.
Another busy day, my mind it full and my body is exhausted!
.NET, Programming
Azure, ms research, parallel programming, PDC, PDC 2008, pex, second light
