The Politics of Parallelism
Is it called the server room? Computer operations? The rack closet? Joe's office? I've lost track. Seems like there's a different name for it wherever I go -- the place in the organization where all the heavy duty (important) computers are kept.
Parallel Execution Advantage on Single Core Intel Atom
I've just had 2 weeks vacation in South America. To help me cope with the long flight I bought a Samsung N110 - which has a battery life of over 9 hours. Also I figured the smaller size would be easier to work with whilst sitting in economy class. Irony was I missed my daytime flight, ended up travelling in the evening and so I slept rather than using the Netbook on the plane.
After a couple of days of being in Brazil, I got itchy fingers, and decided to test the Samsung N110 to see how it performed on parallel programs.
I built and ran my favourite Pi program using the Intel® Compiler that comes with Intel Parallel Studio, and got a performance boost of 1.47.
Web Workers: A Draft Recommendation to Allow Parallelism in Scripts
Most modern Web pages run scripts. So far, there are many limitations to allow these scripts to take advantage of multicore microprocessors. However, Web Workers is a draft specification that defines an API to allow Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel.
America's Next Top Model?
There are several concurrency schemes that describe how parallelism can be performed. Concurrency schemes such as peer-to-peer, boss-worker, workpile, and pipeline describes how tasks distribute work in parallel. SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) and MIMD (Multiple Instructions Multiple Data) are concurrency schemes that achieve data level parallelism.
Balder: A Silverlight 3 Managed 3D Engine Optimized for Multicore
Silverlight 3 doesn't offer native support for loading and rendering 3D models. However, Balder, an open source project, offers a very complete managed 3D engine for Silverlight 3. It achieved the necessary frame rate taking advantage of Silverlight's threading capabilities.
Supercomputer Debugging: More Than Just Breakpoints
There's no question you could set a boatload of breakpoints with a 20-petaflop supercomputer, but you probably need more than that when developing parallelized software for it. You might also resort to fast conditional watchpoints, compiled expressions, asynchronous thread control, and full post-mortem debugging capabilities, and that's just for starters.
Blackbox Parallelism a Hoax?
Once a software paradigm has reached a certain level of saturation and it is understood enough, some vendor is going to produce a template or a commercial framework that captures some of the key basics of that paradigm in a box or in a easy-to-use set of tools. At that point that entire software paradigm is considered solved.
Parallel Loops Require In-Depth Concurrency Knowledge
The new Parallel Extensions offered by .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 present developers the opportunity to use the new parallel loops. Using them, it is easier to distribute tasks in many cores. However, you don't have to forget about concurrency issues.
New Parallel Debugging Windows in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1
Visual Studio 2010, still in Beta 1, offers two new debugging windows: Parallel Stacks and Parallel Tasks. Using them, it is easier to understand the new Parallel Extensions offered by .NET 4.
Tasks Are Not Threads in .NET 4 Beta 1
.Net Framework 4.0 with its Parallel Extensions, still in Beta 1, will add the possibility to work with tasks. It is very important to understand that tasks aren't threads. Tasks run using threads. However, it doesn't mean they replace threads.
