VS2010 Beta1 demos on parallelism

Thu, August 20, 2009, 11:44 PM under ParallelComputing
Recently I updated the slides of my parallelism session to match the Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 bits.

In this post I'd like to share the demos from that session, also updated for .NET 4 Beta1 (my motto is "better late than never" ;-)

Download my demo code files here at your own risk.

The RayTracer sample can be downloaded along with other parallel extension samples.
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HPC Debugging and Profiling support

Fri, August 14, 2009, 12:31 PM under ParallelComputing
Not sure how many subscribers to this blog are HPC developers, but it is an area I will be covering more next year as I am expanding my responsibilities to include the High Performance Computing domain (which obviously falls under the parallelism umbrella). To get a taste of the kind of work we are talking about, read Soma's blog post on the current tooling offerings in that space.
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STM.NET

Fri, August 14, 2009, 12:25 PM under ParallelComputing
Hopefully developers on the Microsoft platform subscribe to the announcements on Soma's blog; if you don't, you may have missed this post pointing to the STM.NET dev lab project (this is the 2nd devlab project released from my extended team, the 1st being Axum). If Software Transactional Memory is your interest, stay tuned on the team's blog.

( after seeing their logo, I'll now try to take out of my mind the Atomic tune )
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Mobile developer? The Race is On!

Fri, August 14, 2009, 12:17 PM under MobileAndEmbedded
In case my Windows Mobile developer friends have missed this, Loke shares how the Race is On!
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Parallel Tasks and Parallel Stacks windows making your debugging life easier

Fri, August 14, 2009, 12:04 PM under ParallelComputing
As I was catching up with my RSS reader I found two posts on John Robbins' blog worth mentioning.

One of them starts with a screenshot and mention of my team's Parallel Stacks window – check out John's blog post on easier multithreaded debugging.

The other blog post offers a macro for the very common requirement to Freeze All Threads But the one of interest. The good news for those of you adopting the task-based programming model is that this is a menu item on the ContextMenu of the new Parallel Tasks window (see last screenshot at the bottom).
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Support more than 64 cores from .NET code?

Fri, July 24, 2009, 05:26 PM under Windows
As you know by now, Windows 7 supports up to 256 logical processors (a 4-fold increase from previous versions). A few months ago I posted my screenshot of a system with 128 cores and reader kotsoft asked why the CPU utilization was at 50%.

The reason is that I was running a straightforward .NET 4 app that used TPL and the CLR 4 ThreadPool does not take advantage of more than 64 cores. Digging deeper reveals that there are certain new (native obviously) APIs that an application must use to go beyond the 64-core support and specifically the ones described here about processor groups – the CLR is not utilizing them in this release.

I wonder who will be the first to wrap these functions from managed code and show an example of their usage…
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RegistryOptions.Volatile in .NET 4

Fri, July 17, 2009, 12:54 PM under dotNET
About 18 months ago I wrote a blog post offering an unsupported solution for working with volatile registry keys from .NET code.

FYI, support for volatile keys is introduced in the Microsoft.Win32 namespace of .NET 4 Beta1 (for the desktop only, so far). The API is simple enough that no sample is needed, start at the new overload for RegistryKey.CreateSubKey that accepts the new enumeration RegistryOptions.
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Updated Beta1 slides for parallelism

Thu, July 2, 2009, 06:56 PM under ParallelComputing
For those of you interested in my session on parallelism with VS2010, I gave an extended/longer version of it recently and included a bunch of new slides and updated the existing ones to match the recent release of VS2010 Beta1. Get the updated pptx here (checkout the annotated slides 16 and 17 on Parallel Tasks and Parallel Stacks).
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Debug .NET dumps with VS2010

Thu, July 2, 2009, 06:45 PM under dotNET
Tess has written a great post on debugging .NET dumps in Visual Studio 2010 (which also briefly touches on the Parallel Stacks window ;-)
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yearsOnThisPlanet++

Thu, July 2, 2009, 06:39 PM under Personal
Today I am one year older (but not wiser ;-). This time last year I got an SSN and had almost no friends in the USA, while this year I've booked a bar to host the many cool people I've met here. If you are in Seattle and coming to my party, it's gonna be messy so come prepared ;-)
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