Entries tagged with parallel computing - Channel 9

Multi-Core and Parallel Programming Practices

Robert Hess — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:51:00 GMT

In case you haven’t realized it, the new trend in computer chip technology is multi-core. This is where most of the speed improvements moving forward will come from on our computers. To take full advantage of this however it is necessary to design your applications using Parallel Programming practices, also known as "parallelism".

In today’s episode, we will meet with Stephen Toub, who will share with us some of the overarching concepts associated with parallelism, and some of the ways we are trying to empower developers to develop applications to take advantage of it.

You may also want to check out Stephen’s presentation from PDC09 on this topic here:

Manycore and .NET 4: A Match Made in Visual Studio 2010

And here is the full set of PDC09 sessions related to parallel programming practices:

Overview:

The State of Parallel Programming

Managed code in Visual Studio 2010:

Native code in Visual Studio 2010:

HPC Server:

Accelerating Applications Using Windows HPC Server 2008

Research and Incubation:

Channel 9 Live at PDC09: Stephen Toub

Nic Fillingham — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:44:00 GMT

Channel 9 Live at PDC09: Stephen Toub with Charles Torre
Recorded Live, November 19th 2009 at 11:30AM (PST)
Click here for full schedule

Wes Dyer: Controlling Concurrency in Rx

Jeffrey van Gogh — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:31:00 GMT

The Rx team has received a lot of questions about Rx and concurrency, thread-affinity, timers and performance. In this video, Wes explains the major changes in the latest release of Rx.

These changes drastically improve the user experience. Your feedback inspired the future direction of Rx.

New bits can be found on the Rx DevLabs page

Interview Tech-Ed 2009 Berlin: Steve Teixeira talks about Parallel Computing with VS 2010 and why you should take care

Oliver Scheffert — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:15:00 GMT

"I have been in the role of the Program Manager for the Developer Track at Tech-Ed 2009 in Berlin this year and decided to run some interviews with some of the speakers in my track. I am talking with Steve Teixeira about Parallel Computing and what new VS 2010 Tools we have for you to win the challenge of building Software utilizing the power of Multicore Systems. If you ask yourself why should I care? If so, this is the right content for you! :-)

Enjoy!"

Christian Binder

http://blogs.msdn.com/cbinder

The Power of Parallel: Parallel Debugging with Visual Studio and Allinea DDTLite on Windows HPCS2008

Wenming Ye — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:03:00 GMT

The era of cluster computing and Multicore drives change for Windows Developers, with development shifting to Threads and Parallel. Microsoft and its rich partner’s ecosystem provide solutions to meet the challenges of parallel development and to accelerate the speed and flexibility of Microsoft Windows applications with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Learn how to harness the power of Multicore, using your current Visual Studio programming experience with Visual Studio and Allinea DDTLite running on Windows HPC Server.

Until now, programmers could not both develop and debug parallel code, either using Threads or MPI (Message Passing Interface) and MPI.NET without having to change tools. Learn about how Microsoft protects and enhances your existing development tools and skills; and how Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, combined with Allinea DDTLite allows you to migrate to your Windows applications to threaded and MPI without disruption.

Allinea DDTLite offers truly parallel debugging for Visual Studio 2008. DDTLite is a Visual Studio plug-in that provides easy, intuitive parallel control in an unobtrusive, integrated way to bring true parallel programming to Visual Studio 2008. With DDTLite, programmers can still use the familiar Visual Studio 2008 features and increase parallel productivity. Running on Windows HPC Server 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Allinea DDTLite provide the optimal development environment and tools to help ease the transition to, and reduce the cost of parallel development. Join us to learn areas to target and how to get started!

Parallel LINQ with code samples

Wenming Ye — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:15:00 GMT

Stephen Toub walks through several sample applications that utilize Parallel LINQ (PLINQ). PLINQ, built into the .NET Framework 4, enables developers to parallelize LINQ to Objects queries with minimal coding effort. The sample applications explored are available for download at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ParExtSamples

Parallel Debugging in Visual Studio 2010 - MSDN mag companion

Daniel Moth — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:37:00 GMT

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth

Introduction:
This screencasts covers the new Parallel Tasks and Parallel Stacks debugging windows in Visual Studio 2010.

It demonstrates the sample code from the MSDN Magazine on this topic which you can read here:
Debugging Task-Based Parallel Applications in Visual Studio 2010

Speeding up Parallel.For using the Range Partitioner

Phil Pennington — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:29:00 GMT

Join Danny Shih as he demonstrates using the range partitioner feature. Parallel.For is great, but being a general solution, it does not perform optimally for certain specific scenarios, such as when there are a ton of iterations and very little work per iteration. In these cases, the range partitioner can be used to speed things up.

Learn more about the .NET Framework 4 and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

See all videos in this series.

TaskCompletionSource

Phil Pennington — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:06:00 GMT

Join Danny Shih as he introduces the TaskCompletionSource<TResult> type. He’ll cover basic usage and walk through a full scenario

Learn more about the .NET Framework 4 and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

See all videos in this series.

Task and Task<TResult>, Waiting and Continuations

Phil Pennington — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:46:00 GMT

Join Danny Shih as he introduces the heart of the Task Parallel Library (TPL). He’ll talk about two core types (Task and Task<TResult>) and two functionalities that they support (waiting and continuations).

Learn more about the .NET Framework 4 and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

See all videos in this series.

Refactoring "for" Loops to Run in Parallel

Phil Pennington — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:13:00 GMT

Join Danny Shih as he demonstrates how to use the Task Parallel Library (TPL) to refactor sequential "for" loops so that they execute in parallel. He’ll also cover breaking out of parallelized loops.Collections and related constructs are new with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010.

Learn more about the .NET Framework 4 and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

See all videos in this series.

Concurrent Programming with .NET4 Collections

Phil Pennington — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:23:00 GMT

Join Josh and Steve as they demonstrate how to use various concurrency-safe Collections classes.

Collections and related constructs are new with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010.

Learn more about the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

See all videos in this series.

How to Cancel Work using .NET4 CancellationToken

Phil Pennington — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:08:00 GMT

Join Josh and Steve as they demonstrate how to safely cancel tasks in a parallel task execution scenario.

CancellationToken and related constructs are new with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010.

Learn more about the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

See all videos in this series.

The .NET4 Countdown Synchronization Primitive

Phil Pennington — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:53:00 GMT

Join Josh and Steve as they demonstrate how to use the new .NET4 Countdown event synchronization primitive in task coordination scenarios.

Countdown and related constructs are new with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010.

Learn more about the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

See all videos in this series.

Lazy<T> Optimized Resource Initialization

Phil Pennington — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:48:00 GMT

Join Josh and Steve as they demonstrate how to use the new .NET4 Lazy<T> class in optimized object initialization scenarios.

Lazy<T> is one of many new thread-safe data-structures available with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010.

Learn more about the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

See all videos in this series.

E2E: Erik Meijer and Burton Smith - Concurrency, Parallelism and Programming

Charles — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:19:00 GMT

The great Burton Smith, Microsoft Technical Fellow and an international leader in high-performance computer architecture and programming languages for parallel computing joins functional programming purist and language design guru Erik Meijer to discuss several major themes of parallel computing and distributed programming. As always, you will get a lesson in history, present trends and future possibilities. This is simply an awesome and deeply wonderful conversation. Burton is a treasure.

Erik shows up for the conversation only after Burton begins to talk about a potential definition for functional programming. Right on queue, Erik arrives!

Burton will be presenting his thinking on parallel and concurrent programming at PDC09. He will also be a panelist on the Future of Programming panel (and Erik will be the panel moderator - you won't want to miss the panel if you are attending PDC!).

Concurrent Visualization Techniques in the VS2010 Profiler

Phil Pennington — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:34:00 GMT

Join Bill Colburn as he demonstrates useful features of the Concurrency Visualizer available in VS2010. He discusses visualization of parallel-for loops, I/O reports, sorting the display of threads, and viewing thread affinity.

Check-out the following additional resources:
- The Parallel Visualization Blog
- The MSDN Parallel Computing Dev-Center
- Visual Studio 2010 on Learning Center
- Download Visual Studio 2010 beta2
- Hazim Shafi’s Blog on Windows Parallel Performance Tools

See all videos in this series.

BlockingCollection<T> Demonstration in Producer-Consumer Scenarios

Phil Pennington — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:22:00 GMT

Join Josh and Steve as they demonstrate how to use the new .NET4 BlockingCollection<T> class in class Producer/Consumer parallel computing scenarios.

BlockingCollection<T> is one of many new thread-safe data-structures available with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010.

Learn more about the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.

See all videos in this series.

New Parallel Capabilities of the Visual Studio 2010 Profiler

Phil Pennington — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:17:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 (currently in beta) includes new Parallel Performance Analysis tools. The new Profiler is a must-have tool for Developers interested in designing new "many-core" parallel-computing applications. Join James as he illustrates the profiler, profiling-options, and concurrency visualization techniques.

Check-out the following additional resources:
- The Parallel Visualization Blog
- The MSDN Parallel Computing Dev-Center
- Visual Studio 2010 on Learning Center
- Download Visual Studio 2010 beta2
- Hazim Shafi’s Blog on Windows Parallel Performance Tools

See all videos in this series.

Visualizing Concurrency: VS 2010 Beta 2 - Parallel Performance Profiling Advancements

Charles — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:21:00 GMT

In Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, you were introduced to new analysis and profiling capabilities (Parallel Profiling and Performance Tools) designed to make concurrency understandable and, ultimately, debuggable. Today, with the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, we introduce an updated and significantly more capable concurrency visualization and profiling tool which is available with other profiling features in Visual Studio 2010 Premium and Ultimate. What does it do, exactly? How does it work?
What's new?

Here, Architect Hazim Shafi, Dev Lead Sasha Dadiomov and PM Bill Colburn tell us all about the Concurrency Visualizer Profiling Tool, including a demo. So, fire up Beta 2, spin up some threads and visualize concurrency. You should profile an already-existing application that employs concurrency and, perhaps for the first time, get to see what your concurrent code is actually doing at run time.

Parallel visualization tools team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/visualizeparallel/

The parallel computing dev center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/default.aspx

Hazim's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/hshafi/default.aspx

VS2010 Parallel Computing Features Tour

Daniel Moth — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:14:00 GMT

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth

Introduction:

In Visual Studio 2010, the Parallel Computing team has delivered APIs and tools for developers wanting to build applications that take advantage of multiple cores. This video provides a glimpse on the managed APIs, debugging windows and profiler support.

For more on the managed APIs, please start on the team's blog. For more on profiler start on that team's blog. For more on Parallel Tasks and Parallel Stacks please start on my blog post on Parallel Debugging.

Parallel Performance Tuning for Haskell

Charles — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Very interesting work with implications for integration into more mainstream runtimes... In general, runtime support for parallel tuning is necessary going forward. The Many Core age has only just begun... This paper is a great read.

Parallel Haskell programming has entered the mainstream with support now included in GHC for multiple parallel programming models, along with multicore execution support in the runtime. However, tuning programs for parallelism is still something of a black art. Without much in the way of feedback provided by the runtime system, it is a matter of trial and error combined with experience to achieve good parallel speedups.

This paper describes an early prototype of a parallel profiling system for multicore programming with GHC. The system comprises three parts: fast event tracing in the runtime, a Haskell library for reading the resulting trace files, and a number of tools built on this library for presenting the information to the programmer. We focus on one tool in particular, a graphical timeline browser called ThreadScope.

Ade Miller and Patterns of Parallel Programming

Robert Hess — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:06:00 GMT

While technically the PDC this year starts on November 17th, the day before that we will be hosting a set of day-long intensive workshops on several specific topics.

One of these workshops will focus on the Patterns of Parallel Programming in order to help developers understand how the applications they are developing can, and should, be designed to take advantage of the multi-core processers which are now becoming common.

In this episode, Ade Miller stops by to share with us the importance of understanding parallelism and some of the issues which need to be considered and how it isn't just a "recompile" to make your applications ready.

You can get more details about this workshop on the PDC website here:

Patterns of Parallel Programming
with Richard Ciapala, Ade Miller, Herb Sutter, Stephen Toub

If you are planning on attending this workshop, feel free to post comments, thoughts, and issues to the discussion thread here so that Ade and the other speakers be sure to try to incorporate your needs in their training material.

Christian Kleinerman: Introduction to SQL Server Project Madison

Charles — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:21:00 GMT

The SQL Server team is working on a new project code-named “Madison”. "Madison" is a highly scalable data warehouse appliance that delivers performance at low cost through massively parallel processing (MPP). How does it work? What's the story? Well, "Madison" Product Unit Manager Christian Kleinerman sure knows the answers and he provides an introduction to this new SQL data warehousing technology. Tune in.

More info here:

http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2009/08/24/microsoft-ships-the-first-technology-preview-for-project-code-named-madison.aspx

The C++ Concurrency Runtime - Asynchronous Agents Library

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:55:00 GMT

The Asynchronous Agents Library (or just Agents Library) provides a programming model that enables you to increase the robustness of concurrency-enabled application development. The Agents Library is a C++ template library that promotes an actor-based programming model and in-process message passing for fine-grained dataflow and pipelining tasks. The Agents Library builds upon the scheduling and resource management components of the Concurrency Runtime.

The agent class itself is intended for course grained parallelism/components that handle larger computationally intensive tasks or collections of smaller tasks. Fundamentally, agents are tasks that have an observable lifecycle and communicate with other agents by using message passing. Agents are NOT intended to be used for fine-grained parallelism; for that, the patterns and constructs in the Parallel Patterns Library are better suited.

You'll want to subscribe to the Native Concurrency blog, find more resource and download example code from Code Gallery.