Entries tagged with parallel computing - Channel 9

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.

Lazy 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.

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

BlockingCollection 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.

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

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 debugging please start on my blog post here.

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.

The C++ Concurrency Runtime - Parallel Patterns Library

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

The C++ Concurrency Runtime is new with Visual Studio 2010 and currently in beta. The runtime encapsulates and extends many new operating system features including NUMA resource locality and User-Mode-Scheduling.

The Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) provides an imperative programming model that promotes scalability and ease-of-use for developing concurrent applications. The PPL raises the level of abstraction between your application code and the underlying thread/task scheduling mechanisms by providing generic, type-safe algorithms and containers that act on data in parallel. The PPL also enables you to develop applications that scale by providing alternatives to shared state.

The PPL provides the following features:

Task Parallelism: a mechanism to execute several work items (tasks) in parallel.
Parallel algorithms: generic algorithms that act on collections of data in parallel.
Parallel containers and objects: generic container types that provide safe concurrent access to their elements.

By using PPL, you can introduce fine-grained parallelism without even having to manage a scheduler. You would use the Asynchronous Agents Library instead to express coarse-grained parallelism.

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

Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Michael Isard - Inside Dryad

Charles — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:55:00 GMT

Microsoft Research recently announced the availability, under Academic Licensing, of Dryad, an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs.

A Dryad programmer can use thousands of machines, each of them with multiple processors or cores, without knowing anything about concurrent programming.

That's a pretty heady statement. What does Dryad do, exactly, to enable this level of abstraction, shielding programmers from the incredibly complex world of distributed parallel computing? Does the level of abstraction impact the degree to which sophisticated programmers can interact with and control some of the low level mechanisms of the Dryad runtime? What is it about LINQ that made it the no-brainer managed programming abstraction for Dryad?

Simply, how does Dryad work? This is the core question that Erik and I had after our conversation with Roger Barga (part one of this E2E mini-series on Dryad and DryadLINQ - perhaps we should focus just on DryadLINQ next time, but for now, all the information in this conversation is certain to keep you very busy and answer many questions you may have after learning about Dryad in part one...).

Lots of whiteboarding here. Put on your thinking caps!

Enjoy.

Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Roger Barga - Introduction to Dryad and DryadLINQ

Charles — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:43:00 GMT

Microsoft Research recently announced the availability, under Academic Licensing, of Dryad, an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs. A Dryad programmer can use thousands of machines, each of them with multiple processors or cores, without knowing anything about concurrent programming.

DryadLINQ is the managed high level programming abstraction used to compose Dryad vertex topology graphs that the Dryad infrastructure uses to partition parallel computations. Here, Erik Meijer and Dryad team member Roger Barga discuss Drayad and DryadLINQ at a high level so that most of us can understand the implications, history and future of Dryad. This is an introductory piece. Erik and I will dive deep into Dryad with one of the scientists behind it in the second part of this Expert to Expert mini series on Dryad. UPDATE: The Going Deep episode on Dryad is now live.

Enjoy! This is incredible and important technology for simplifying the inherent complexity of distributed computation in the cloud. In essence, DryadLINQ enables a sequential programming experience over what will execute across potentially thousands of machines (depending upon the computational complexity of the program) concurrently. Much to learn here. Channel 9 will help teach.

Editorial note: When we discuss native code and the implementation of Dryad, the focus is on DryadLINQ not the Dryad infrastructure and low level vertex APIs, which are written in C++. Just to be clear...

Useful links:

Connect site: http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=891

ER Website on Academic Use: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/tools/dryad.aspx

MSR Info: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/dryadlinq/

Parallel Computing TechTalk (nur der VS2010 Teil)

Dariusz Parys — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:13:00 GMT

Dies ist die Aufzeichnung der Parallel Computing TechTalk Tour die zusammen mit Intel(r) durchgeführt wurde. Die komplette Aufzeichnung des Abends findet sich hier.

Diese Aufzeichnung stellt nur den Teil rund um Visual Studio 2010 vor.

Viel Spaß beim reinschauen,
Dariusz

Task Parallel Library: Parallel Invoke

Dariusz Parys — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:07:00 GMT

In diesem Screencast wird gezeigt wie die Klasse Parallel verwendet werden kann um einfache Funktionsblöcke parallel auszuführen. Der Screencast basiert auf der Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 und demzufolge kann sich die API ändern.

Viel Spaß beim reinschauen,
Dariusz

Task Parallel Library: Task Results

Dariusz Parys — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:56:00 GMT

In diesem Screencast wird gezeigt wie die Klasse Task Rückgabewerte an die Ablauflogik zurückliefern kann. . Der Screencast basiert auf der Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 und demzufolge kann sich die API ändern.

Viel Spaß beim reinschauen,
Dariusz

How to leap over the parallel chasm: Using the Intel® Parallel Studio to develop, test and tune parallel code.

Matthijs Hoekstra — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:22:00 GMT

Despite the abundance of multicore PCs, the software world has yet to catch up with the parallel world. Application developers are under pressure to write applications that make use of the extra processing power available from the latest generation of multicore CPUs. The question is not when but how. In this session learn how to use Intel® Parallel Studio to introduce parallelism into your applications. The session includes a live ‘hands-on’ demo of how to use Parallel Studio to analyze where to add parallelism, how to compile and debug parallel programs, how to spot hard-to-find memory and threading errors, and finally how to tune parallel applications for maximum performance. Intel Parallel Studio consists of four products Intel® Parallel Advisor, Intel® Parallel Composer, Intel® Parallel Inspector and Intel® Parallel Amplifier. This presentation demonstrates how these tools can be used end-to-end in the development cycle.

This video is recorded at the Dutch DevDays in Den Haag The Netherlands in June 2009. DevDays is the largest industry event for developers in the Netherlands. Thousands of professional developers visit DevDays yearly to keep in touch with the latest developments in their field.

Task Parallel Library: Exception Handling

Dariusz Parys — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:42:00 GMT

In diesem Screencast wird gezeigt wie man auf Exceptions in parallelen Abläufen der Klasse Task reagieren kann. Der Screencast basiert auf der Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 und demzufolge kann sich die API ändern.

Viel Spaß beim reinschauen,
Dariusz

Task Parallel Library: Task Continuations

Dariusz Parys — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:41:00 GMT

In diesem Screencast wird gezeigt wie sich Aufgaben mit Hilfe der Task Klasse verketten lassen, um so auf Ereignisse in der parallelisierten Abarbeitung zu reagieren. Der Screencast basiert auf der Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 und demzufolge kann sich die API ändern.

Viel Spaß beim reinschauen,
Dariusz

Task Parallel Library: Tasks

Dariusz Parys — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:41:00 GMT

In diesem Screencast wird die neue Klasse Task der Task Parallel Library vom kommenden .NET Framework 4.0 vorgestellt. Der Screencast basiert auf der Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 und demzufolge kann sich die API ändern.

Viel Spaß beim reinschauen,
Dariusz

Parallel Tasks – new Visual Studio 2010 debugger window

Daniel Moth — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:29:00 GMT

UPDATED for the VS2010 Beta 2 release

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth

Introduction:

In the next version of .NET and C++ that ship with Visual Studio 2010, a new task-based programming model is introduced. In this short video you will learn about Parallel Tasks, a new debugger window that helps developers debug applications that use tasks. You will also get a glimpse at the task-specific features of the Parallel Stacks debugger window introduced in another video.

To read more about the features of the Parallel Tasks window please read my blog post here. To follow some steps and explore the Parallel Tasks (and Parallel Stacks) windows on your own Visual Studio 2010 follow this MSDN walkthrough.

Parallel Stacks – new Visual Studio 2010 debugger window

Daniel Moth — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:21:00 GMT

UPDATED for the VS2010 Beta 2 release

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth

Introduction:

As developers try to take advantage of more and more cores in their applications, ultimately more and more threads will execute their code at the same time. When debugging such applications, there is a need to visualize multiple call stacks of multiple threads in a single view. This scenario is supported in Visual Studio 2010 via a new debugger window that this short video explores: Parallel Stacks.

To read more about the features of the Parallel Stacks window please read my blog posts here, here and here. To follow some steps and explore the Parallel Stacks (and Parallel Tasks) windows on your own Visual Studio 2010 installation, follow this MSDN walkthrough.

geekSpeak Recording - Parallel Computing APIs in .NET 4.0 with Mark Michaelis

Brian Johnson — Mon, 18 May 2009 20:42:00 GMT

We are approaching an asymptote for processor speeds using current technology. To overcome this, computer power is increasing by scaling the number of processors used within a system. This increase in multithreading capabilities, however, complicates development considerably. In this geekSpeak, we'll chat with Microsoft Regional Director Mark Michaelis about how .NET 4.0 simplifies this paradigm with new APIs that leverage the power of recent .NET language extensions and .NET 4.0 API enhancements - Task Parallel Library and ParallelLINQ. Your hosts for this geekSpeak are Lynn Langit and Mithun Dhar.

The geekSpeak webcast series brings you industry experts in a "talk-radio" format hosted by developer evangelists from Microsoft. These experts share their knowledge and experience about a particular developer technology and are ready to answer your questions in real time during the webcast. To ask a question in advance of the live webcast, or for post-show resources, be sure to visit the geekSpeak blog.

Presenters: Mark Michaelis, Enterprise Software Architect, Itron, Inc.

Mark Michaelis is an Enterprise Software Architect at Itron Inc. Additionally, Mark recently started intelliTechture, a software engineering and consulting company with high end skills in Microsoft VSTS/TFS, BizTalk, SharePoint, and .NET 3.0. Mark also serves as a Chief Software Architect and Trainer for IDesign Inc. Mark holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Illinois and an MS in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is also recognized by Microsoft as a Regional Directory. Starting in 1996, he has been a Microsoft MVP for C#, Visual Studio Team System, and the Windows SDK. He serves on several Microsoft software design review teams, including C#, the Connected Systems Division and VSTS/TFS. Mark speaks at developer conferences both nationally and internationally and has written several articles and books, in addition to maintaining a blog at http://mark.michaelis.net/Blog/. His most recent book is Essential C# 3.0 (Addison-Wesley, 2008). When not bonding with his computer, Mark is busy with his family or training for the Ironman.