Entries tagged with computing - Channel 9

C9 Conversations: Brian Beckman on Complexity

Charles — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:24:00 GMT

In this second installment of C9 Conversations, a format where we sit down with various big thinkers to discuss a wide range of big topics related to computing; all in high quality video and audio, the topic is Complexity (ambient complexity, to be precise - it's hard to program systems that are radically composable. Why?).

Dr. Brian Beckman is an astrophysicist and software architect with a long history of dealing with various levels of complexity. In some sense, most of what we do as programmers and engineers is control complexity to solve problems of various difficulty. In our world of software engineering, we strive to carve simplicity out of the complexity of computing. Dr. Beckman provides his insights into why it so hard to achieve radical composability in the software systems we design and build and what it will take to realize ambient simplicity as we march into the increasingly complex world of general purpose computing.

We think you'll really enjoy this conversation with one of Microsoft's best thinkers.

Margaret Burnett: Gender and Software

Charles — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:49:00 GMT

Meet Dr. Margaret Burnett, a Professor of Computer Science at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. She is exploring hypotheses correlating and differentiating (or unifying) both the design and usage patterns of software by gender. Dr. Burnett has spent the last three months as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research. Great fodder for the latest edition of WM_IN, we thought, and we were lucky enough to catch up with Dr. Burnett during her last week at MSR to talk about her focus of study, which is the fascinating topic of gender differences and human-computer interaction that exist in the ways people solve problems when they use software.

Dr. Burnett's current research focuses on end-user programming, end-user software engineering, information foraging theory as applied to programming, and gender issues in those contexts. She is also the principal architect of the Forms/3 and the FAR visual programming languages, plus the WYSIWYT testing methodology for end-user programmers. Watch, learn and enjoy!

Intelligent Light: Computational Fluid Dynamics and High Performance Computing

Charles — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:21:00 GMT

Before a plane flies for the first time, in the sky, it has flown many thousands of virtual miles in distributed clusters of computation cells, calculating non-linear differential equations of fluid dynamics.

Intelligent Light, with its Fortran and Python writing programmers, represents a typical ISV in the Microsoft HPC partner community with their flagship application having long been available on UNIX and Linux HPC clusters. Intelligent Light provides an application called FieldView that takes massive data from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications and visualizes that data for engineers who design F16 fighters and Formula One cars. Because of the long compute times required, FieldView is often run in parallel on High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters to return quicker results. In this video, Intelligent Light founder Steve Legensky demonstrates the complex mathematics used by CFD engineers and talks about how HPC has evolved in his industry over the past 20 years.

Steve is awesome.

Check out the Microsoft ISV site for more information about ISVs working with Microsoft.

Xin Wang: Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence and Search

Charles — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:39:00 GMT

Meet Xin Wang, SciFi fan and an expert in artificial intelligence (she has a Ph.D in it!). Today she works on Markov decision problems and how to use approximate optimization problems that can be traced all the way back to Sir Issac Newton to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Xin has worked as an SDE at Microsoft for more than 4 years; when she first started she worked on a very cool project for ink parsing on the Tablet PC. Watch the video to find out more about this very interesting software developer!

Algorithms and Data Structures: Mike Swanson - Genetic Session Scheduler

Charles — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:46:07 GMT

Mike Swanson is at it again. You've seen Mike on Channel 9 before and you've probably used his SWF to XAML converter that he wrote a while back. His latest side project promises to be quite useful for conference owners who have the complex task of planning sessions for big technical events like PDC or TechED. In fact, Mike is the PDC08 content owner and this task falls squarely on his shoulders. Instead of littering his office with Post-It notes that represent sessions, speakers, session times and locations, he decided to write an algorithm to solve his problem, specifically a genetic algorithm.

This is the first epsiode of a new series on Channel 9, Data Structures and Algorithms, that will focus on, well, data structures and algorithms :) Each episode will feature an engineer at a whiteboard discussing solutions to algorithms that they invented or improved upon. There are many clever people who write code for Microsoft and Channel 9 will continue to highlight them and their work. This new series is an attempt to really focus the conversation to one problem and it's algorithmic solution (which will often involve the advent of new data structures).

Enjoy. Mike is as much an engineer as he is a technical evangelist. His genetic session scheduler is an innovative approach to solving a problem rife with tediousness. Well done, Mike!

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Russell Hadley: The Route to C++ Code Optimization

Charles — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:43:14 GMT

It's nice to write clean code (code that looks good, is organized, is easy for others to understand by reading it, etc). As developers we get to use great tools to implement algorithms in our favorite languages. The act of composing a program is much like that of writing a story or, in some cases, a poem :) But the underlying hardware isn't much interested in intelligent class hierachies and easy-to-understand lines of programming language syntax. Processors do not speak C++ or Java or C# or VB, etc.

The focus of this interview is mapping the (long and complicated)path to executable machine code that the machine natively understands and acts upon, bringing your code to life. How does this work, exactly?

Russell Hadley is a senior developer on the C++ team here at Microsoft and he spends his days (and nights, ocassionally) writing code that takes the front-end compilation linear (flattened) blob and turns it into highly optimized machine code patterns that the processor can execute in a highly efficient manner.

This is a deep interview with lots of whiteboarding, but it is shallow enough so you won't drown if you can't swim very well. Enjoy. This is another great conversation with one of the C++ experts who live in Building 41.

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Brian Beckman: Project Quark - A New Beginning for Quantum Computing Rises from the Ashes of Theoret

Charles — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:58:15 GMT

Software Architect and Astrophysicist Brian Beckman has a new job at Microsoft. No longer working with Erik Meijer on cutting edge developer tools and programming languages, Brian has joined a very small team of distinguished engineers and technical fellows that seeks to create a new product for Microsoft, code named Quark.

Brian and his big brained colleagues have produced a prototype quantum computing device that takes the notion of parallel computation to a whole new level... The really interesting thing here is that Brian has determined that theoretical phyiscs has completed. What does that mean, you ask? Well, only Dr. Beckman can explain it in terms that everybody will be able to comprehend.

Tune in. This is very big news. Computing will never be the same thanks to Brian and his colleagues working in the newly formed (and apt-named!) Quantum Unreality Computation Group.

Enjoy.

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Reborn Studio: Web Video Experts

Michael S. Scherotter — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 06:23:11 GMT

Michael Scherotter interviews Michael Marina and Patrick Tran, founders of Reborn Studio, a web development company that is specializing in building ASP.Net-based web video community sites like My Damn Channel, WebRidesTV, LogicBuy, and LogicTV.

Burton Smith: On General Purpose Super Computing and the History and Future of Parallelism

Charles — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:34:00 GMT

Burton Smith is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who thinks about ways in which our platform needs to be structured to support general purpose computers that will soon have clustered super computer processing power as we move closer to manycore everywhere (not too far off into the future...). Burton is a parallel computing expert, an industry thought leader in high performance, massively parallel distributed (aka super) computing. Winner of the Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, Burton knows a thing or two about how to architect and implement software systems that can succeed in the Age of Manycore.

This is a long and great conversation, unedited of course. You'll want to make some time for this and listen carefully to what Burton says. This is a very important general introduction to parallelism and high performance computing. As always, we can't talk about super computing without addressing program language evolution in the context of manycore (you've seen this quite a bit on C9 over the years). We cover a lot of ground here including Burton's insights into functional programming, transactions, compatability, shared mutable state, operating systems, technical redunancy and the role of Technical Fellows in the post-Bill era.

Enjoy this great introduction to parallelism and the future of our platform technologies and tools as we head into the age of manycore. This is the first in a series of several interviews covering parallel computing and Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform technologies, specifically.

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Dan Ingalls and Allen Wirfs-Brock: On Smalltalk, Lively Kernel, Javascript and Programming the Inter

Charles — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:37:54 GMT

I recently attended Lang.NET 2008 and, as expected, learned a great deal from some of the industry's finest language and compiler minds.

Here, we meet Dan Ingalls and Allen Wirfs-Brock, two legendary Smalltalkers (contributors to the language). Dan Ingalls is well known for his work at Xerox PARC and his contributions along with Alan Kay to Smalltalk. Dan is also very passionate about Javascript. So much so, that he's gone and created a very interesting Javascript-only project named Lively Kernel. And you can thank Dan for Bit blit.

Allen Wirfs-Brock is currently working on some very interesting language enhancements that he can't talk about publicly :)

Join us as we discuss a whole range of very interesting topics.

Enjoy!

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Erik Meijer, Gilad Bracha, Mads Torgersen: Perspectives on Programming Language Design and Evolution

Charles — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:52:00 GMT

I attended Lang.NET 2008 and, as expected, learned a great deal from some of the industry's finest language and compiler minds. One of the most interesting talks was Gilad Bracha's session on his new programming language, Newspeak. Newspeak is really compelling from a language design perspective because of its pluggable type system (everything in Newspeak is virtual). His talk was really deep and targeted at his fellow language designers, but it's all starting to make sense to me now (takes a while to sink into my thick skull).

Erik Meijer, our resident programming language guru and a deacon in the Church of the Lamda Calculus (:)), was of course in attendance and presented on the current state of Volta (an excellent managed tier-splitting technology that you should definitely play with).

Mads Torgersen, Danish computer scientist and member of the C# design team, was also in attendance. It's always fun to chat with Mads. He's got a very well balanced and insightful perspective on pragmatic programming language design. We're lucky to have him working with Anders et al on the evolution of C#.

I thought it would be a great idea to get these three characters together in one place to talk about what they know best: programming languages. We have a great discussion on type systems, programming language history, DLR and language futures.

If you are into programming language design, then this is for you. There is no white boarding, but the conversation is deep given the topics covered... It's also a really fun interview with exceptional personalities. We laugh a lot, which is always a good thing. So, step outside of the box, settle into a comfy chair (this is a long one - unedited as usual) and get some new perspectives on programming language design and evolution from some of the top minds in the industry.

Enjoy!

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TechNet Radio: Building a Green Datacenter

erickingfrog — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:35:52 GMT

On today’s TechNet radio, we talk with Dave Ohara about building a Green Datacenter. What is a Green Datacenter, and how can it be implemented? What are some strategies to getting executive buyoff?

Eric Ostrowski - Your Show Host and TechNet Radio Producer

Dave Ohara - Dave Ohara has 26 years of experience in technology, working for such companies as Microsoft, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard. Working in product development, marketing, technical evangelism, infrastructure architecture, process engineering, reliability engineering, and distribution logistics, Dave is now working with multiple companies implementing green initiatives.

Expert to Expert: Brian Beckman and Sam Druker - Deep Entity Framework

Charles — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:53:29 GMT

You've seen a few conversations on Channel 9 about Microsoft's Brian Beckman recently had a deep technical chat with Sam Druker about the Entity Framework data model and related technologies.

Sam is GM of the Data Programmability Group at Microsoft and also happens to be Brian's boss and former programming colleague. Sam's a very technically-inclined executive... He has to be considering he's a leader in the Microsoft group that makes SQL and the plethora of data-related platform technologies, not to mention that he has to manage the likes of Erik Meijer and Brian Beckman.

This interview is great for two simple reasons. The first reason is that, well, it's a great (and deep, including whiteboarding) conversation between experts that spans many technologies related to SQL and the Entity Framework.

The second reason is that this is the first in a series of interviews on Channel 9 that involve experts in one domain (or many domains, like Brian) who interview other experts in another domain that is not well understood by the interviewer (so, in this case, for example, the venerable Brian Beckman really does not ask any questions that he already knows the answer to. Brian is not an expert in EF, but possesses a very unique perspective in this case given his mathematical tendencies and expert level understanding of things like set theory...). Yours truly, Charles, takes part in the conversation of course, but I'm mainly a camera guy who throws in a random question once and a while. Brian drives this interview.

Like you, I'm in the audience and learning from people who truly understand the deepest levels of a given platform technology. Again, Brian Beckman conducts this interview and I think this is a trend you are going to really enjoy.

Thank you, Brian and Sam!

You'll see more of this class of interview in the future on Channel 9.

Learn. Enjoy.

TechNet Radio: Microsoft and HPC: Driving High Productivity in a Competitive World

erickingfrog — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:24:38 GMT

Kevin Remde and Shawn Hansen discuss how customers and software developers have introduced HPC in new ways, driving productivity from small turnkey clusters to clusters as large as 7000 nodes.

Eric Ostrowski - Your Show Host and TechNet Radio Producer

Kevin Remde – IT Pro Evangelist

Shawn Hansen - Shawn Hansen is Director of Marketing for High Performance Computing at Microsoft.

Programming in the Age of Concurrency - Anders Hejlsberg and Joe Duffy: Concurrent Programming with

Charles — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:21:00 GMT

Microsoft is developing a number of technologies to simplify the expression of parallelism in code. An example of this work is Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework (PFX), a managed programming model for data parallelism, task parallelism, scheduling, and coordination on parallel hardware.

PFX makes it easier for developers to write programs that take advantage of parallel hardware (you've all heard of multi-core and what the future holds with many-core...), without having to deal with the complexities of threads and locks in today’s concurrent programming story. Of course, PFX is not a concurrent programming silver bullet. There is still a great deal of work left to do in the imperative programming world's approach to concurrency. PFX is an excellent start with a syntax that .NET developers can relate to and understand.

Here, Joe Duffy, Senior Software Engineer, and Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg sit down with me to discuss the basics and some of the details of the managed PFX library's architecture and implementation, whiteboard included.

For more information on specific technologies, check out the PLINQ and TPL articles in the October 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine.

High res video download file here.

Ale Contenti and Louis Lafreniere: Understanding Exceptions and When/How to Handle Them

Charles — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:47:00 GMT

Sometimes, things go wrong when code executes. You can't predict when this will happen or even why, but you can write code to handle exceptional problems. If you're lucky, the problem will carry with it a bunch of useful information that you can use, at runtime, to handle the specific error. These exceptional information structures are called structured exceptions; blobs of bad news carrying useful and specific information that you can use to find your way out of the exceptional rabbit hole. Of course, with useful data packaged up in an exception you can more easily debug to find root causes, which is much harder to do with, say, error codes...

What is a structured exception, exactly? How should you handle exceptions that you don't assume will arise during the execution of your code? What are the correct patterns of exception handling that you can safely rely on? What does the C++ compiler have to do with exception code patterns?

Come along for ride into the deep and murky world of exceptions with some folks that truly understand them at the most fundamental levels.

Ale Contenti is a senior development lead in the C++ base class libraries team. Louis Lafreniere is a principal software developer in the C++ compiler group. Here, Ale and Louis teach us about exceptions and handling them (and when not to handle them). I love talking to the VC++ People. They live on the metal and really understand the fascinating intracacies of our platform.

Enjoy this latest Going Deep episode.

Brian Beckman: A Brief History of Computing

Charles — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 18:07:18 GMT

I recently got the chance to sit down with Brian Beckman, physicist, programmer and Apollo Soyuz international space mission incorporated a programmable calculator, the HP-65, to calculate precise course corrections for the rendezvous and linking of Apollo and Soyuz space crafts? A calculator!! Indeed, programmable calculators are the predecessors of today's computers. But what came before the hand-held computing titans of the 70s? What was the first computer?

Brian has quite a collection of computing devices in his office, some of which, as expected, predate digital devices. We get a look at these and learn about their place in history.

Of course, Brian is a software developer with uncanny capability for designing accurate simulations (remember the C9 Screencast to dig into what he did, so look for this showing up soon!

As always, it was a pleasure to converse with Brian and learn about how computers got to where they are today. It's a long interview, so get comfortable, relax, and learn from a master.