Entries tagged with parallel extensions - Channel 9

Wes Dyer and Stephen Toub: Rx and Px - Working Together

Charles — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:56:00 GMT

Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) released this week during PDC09. Rx uses Parallel Extensions for .NET (Px) for all of it's concurrent and parallel computing needs. How is it using Px, specifically? What's going on here and why?

Stephen Toub, PM on the Px team, and Wes Dyer, developer on the Rx team, tell us all about this partnership the experience of collaborating on two very compatible technologies that, taken together, create something beautiful. Some many xs, so little time.

Enjoy.

deCast - Introducing parallelism into your applications

Rob Bagby — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:20:00 GMT

The trend in hardware has shifted from scaling up (faster processors) to scaling out (more processors). In order for our applications to take advantage of these additional processing power, we need to introduce parallelism into our applications. In this screencast, Rob Bagby illustrates 3 approaches you can take when introducing parallelism to your applications: 1) Fine-grained parallelism, 2) Structured parallelism and 3) PLINQ. The approach Rob takes is to start with an a sequential application and parallelize it using each of the 3 approaches.
You can read Rob's blog post on Introducing parallelism into your applications and download the sample code here.

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: 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

Parallel Programming with .NET Parallel Extensions

Phil Pennington — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:54:00 GMT

This video demonstrates the use of Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework. Parallel Extensions requires .NET 3.5 and the final version will be part of the .NET 4.0 Framework when released. These extensions introduce new classes and functionality into the System.Threading namespace. It's now considerably easier to parallelize a code block without creating explicit threads.

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 introduce new system-level features (e.g. User-Mode-Scheduling) that both the C++ Concurrency Runtime and the .NET Parallel Extensions extend. Developers may easily target current and legacy platforms using the new runtime and extensions.

First, a project is shown that counts the number of primes up to a given upper bound. Each number is checked by seeing if it’s divisible by any number between 2 and its square root. Each prime number found increases the count. The main control is a standard for loop.

Next, the same code is converted to work with the new Parallel.For() method. This takes the lower and upper bound, and a delegate for the action to take. Using a Lamda expression, the original loop body is made to work using i => {} syntax. When this code is run, it is clear that a bug has surfaced in the form of a bad prime count. This is actually a common multithreading bug, stemming from the use of the increment operator, ++. Using the Interlocked.Increment() method fixes the problem.

The next demo starts with a LINQ query and converts to a Parallel LINQ, or PLINQ, query. After demonstrating the original loop which uses Enumerable.Range() to generate a range of numbers, it is shown that ParallelEnumerable.Range() creates an enumerator that is automatically multi-threaded.

Finally, to demonstrate a more general-usage solution, any IEnumerable collection can easily be parallelized using the expression method AsParallel(). Thus, a collection students of type List<Student> could be used in a LINQ as a parallel query by simply using it as students.AsParallel().

Learn more about Parallel Computing on Windows at the MSDN Concurrency Dev Center.

10-4 Episode 6: Parallel Extensions

Jason Olson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:18:00 GMT

In this episode of 10-4, we start taking a look at Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework. We'll look at some of the surface-area of the Parallel Extensions API and provide you with enough information to start working with it yourself in the Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC.

Remember that we are running these bits within a virtual machine with a single virtual processor, so you won't be able to see the performance improvements from the library. However, you will be able to start get a feel for the API itself. In future episodes, we will dive into deeper details of the various parts of Parallel Extensions.

Also, in next week's episode, Jonathan Carter will be back to talk about another new feature in ASP.NET 4.0, so make sure to stay tuned for that!

For more 10-4 episodes, be sure to visit:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4

Visual Studio Topic Area on Channel 9:
http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio

Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC:
http://tinyurl.com/GetCTP

Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit
http://tinyurl.com/VS10Kit

Concurrency MSDN Dev Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/concurrency

10-4! Over and out!

Technical Summit 2008: Steve Teixeira on Parallel Computing

Dariusz Parys — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:27:00 GMT

Auf dem Technical Summit 2008 durfte ich mit Steve Teixeira aus dem Parallel Computing Tools Team der Microsoft Corporation sprechen. Steve hat mir einige der Dinge gezeigt die in Visual Studio 2010 kommen werden um Multithreaded Anwendungen einfacher im Debugger und Profiler analysieren zu können. Das Interview selbst ist in Englisch.

English:
During the Technical Summit 2008 I had the pleasure to Interview Steve Teixeira about the work his team is doing at Microsoft. Steve gave me a sneak peak on what is coming in Visual Studio 2010 regarding the tools support for multithreaded applications.

Enjoy,

Dariusz

Using the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework

Jason Olson — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:37:00 GMT

Welcome back to another Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Week video. In this latest installment, we catch up with Stephen Toub, Senior Program Manager on the Parallel Computing Platform team.

Stephen takes us through a whirlwind tour of many different Parallel Extensions features, showing them in action. Covered are features like Parallel LINQ, Parallel.For, the Task Parallel Library, and some of the new Coordination Data Structures.

Enjoy!

This is another Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Week Video. For other Visual Studio 2010 videos, check out the Visual Studio topic area here on Channel 9.

Back To Basics - Race Conditions, Part 1

Jason Olson — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:40:00 GMT

Welcome to the "Back To Basics" Screencast Series. In this series of screencasts, we will be taking a look at specific .NET language features, as well as features of the .NET Framework itself. We'll be playing particular attention to how these various features work and why you, as a developer, need to understand how they work.

In the first several screencasts, we'll take a look at several common pitfalls when writing multi-threaded code. In this screencast, we'll dive into race conditions, how they can show up in your code, and what you can do to fix them.

Parallel Computing Platform: Overview and Future Directions

Charles — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The Parallel Computing Platform team's David Callahan (Distinguished Engineer) and Keith Yedlin (Product Unit Manager) sit down with me to discuss Microsoft's vision for general purpose Parallel Computing. Keith demos the power of the Microsoft Parallel Computing Platform on a 26 processor machine. Even cooler than the substantial performance improvements is the small change to a for loop (adding .NET Extensions' new Parallel.For) that results in incredible performance gains. See for yourself.

Of course, this is Channel 9 (and I am without Marketing bones...) so we talk about a lot of things related to concurrency and parallel computing. Do we have all the answers? Of course not. Are we making significant strides in our quest to bring more super computing capability to the general purpose software developer. David is a seasoned veteran in the parallel computing space (he was an engineer at Cray...) and he owns the Microsoft "Quest" for parallel computing, generally. Keith has to make sure that we come up with is truly useful to customers and not just simplified rocket science.

Tune in!

PDC08: Parallelism Track and PreCon with Stephen Toub

Charles — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:38:00 GMT

Parallelism will be an important theme of PDC08 (http://microsoftpdc.com/). You'll want to get up to speed with the current state of the art in parallel computing patterns and platform technologies like the Task Parallel Library, Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework, etc. This is where a the Parallelism PreCon comes in. Spend all day with experts in parallelism (Joe Duffy, David Callahan, Steven Toub) and learn about what you can do today to take advantage of multi-core machines. Here, Stephen Toub makes a brief pitch for the PreCon in Parallelism.

This Week on Channel9: TechEd, Bill Gates, Data Mining, IronRuby and more

Dan Fernandez — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:14:00 GMT

This Week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian report from TechEd Developers 2008 in Orlando including:

Dan interviewing Bill Gates
Silverlight 2 Beta 2 now available
Interview with Rafal Luckawiecki
C9 Byte: John Lam shows of an IronRuby implementation of Try Ruby using Silverlight
C9 Byte: Stephen Toub showing off an amazing photo editing application that uses the Parallel Task Library
Clips from Laura Foy working the crowd at TechEd (Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3)
C9 V4 Launches
At the end of the show, weird random guy makes Brian and I awkward (more than usual) ...we'll have to find out who he is

C9 Bytes: Parallel LINQ and Amazing Photo Colorization using Parallel Fx with Stephen Toub

Dan Fernandez — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:02:00 GMT

Stephen Toub shows off two demos, one using the AsParallel statement to dramatically decrease LINQ query times and the second demo is a simple image editing application that enables you to add dynamic coloring/black and white to a photo, similar to effects in movies like Pleasantville or Sin City.

As this is a CPU-intensive operation, you can see how changing a for loop to a Parallel.For loop dramatically improves the application's performance.

C9 Bytes: Parallel Fx using Ray Tracing with Stephen Toub

Dan Fernandez — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:52:00 GMT

Stephen Toub, a Program Manager on the Parallel Fx team, demos how to get 400+% performance increase in a CPU intensive Ray Tracing program by switching one line of code from a regular for loop to using the Parallel.For command.

Inside Parallel Extensions for .NET 2008 CTP Part 2

Charles — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:33:00 GMT

In addition to CDS, this upgrade provides several improvements, including a new scheduler that is more robust, efficient, and scalable. TPL also exposes new functionality, including methods for continuations. PLINQ now runs on top of TPL, clarifies order-preservation, and provides several new operators.

The June CTP works with the .NET Framework 3.5 as a simple, small-footprint installation that drops a single DLL, documentation, samples, and registers the DLL with Visual Studio 2008.

Here, we continue the discussion with the key engineers of the Microsoft Parallel Computing Platform (which includes the Parallel Extensions for .NET...): Lead Developer Joe Duffy, Developer Huseyin Yildiz, Developer Igor Ostrovsky. Program Manager Stephen Toub and Program Manager Ed Essey.

We dig deeply into a lot of topics related to parallelism and conconcurency and how the new additions to the platform enable developers to exploit multi/many core processors in an elegant way.

Enjoy part 2. See part 1 here.

Inside Parallel Extensions for .NET 2008 CTP Part 1

Charles — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:06:00 GMT

Parallel Extensions simplifies development by providing library-based support for introducing concurrency into applications written with any .NET language, including C# and Visual Basic. It includes the Task Parallel Library (TPL), which provides imperative data and task parallelism; Parallel LINQ (PLINQ), which provides declarative data parallelism; and all new Coordination Data Structures (CDS), which provide support for work coordination and managing shared state.

In addition to CDS, this upgrade provides several improvements, including a new scheduler that is more robust, efficient, and scalable. TPL also exposes new functionality, including methods for continuations. PLINQ now runs on top of TPL, clarifies order-preservation, and provides several new operators.

The June CTP works with the .NET Framework 3.5 as a simple, small-footprint installation that drops a single DLL, documentation, samples, and registers the DLL with Visual Studio 2008.

Here, we meet some of the key engineers of the Microsoft Parallel Computing Platform (which includes the Parallel Extensions for .NET...): Lead Developer Joe Duffy, Developer Huseyin Yildiz, Developer Igor Ostrovsky, Program Manager Stephen Toub and Program Manager Ed Essey.

We dig deeply into a lot of topics related to parallelism and conconcurency and how the new additions to the platform enable developers to exploit multi/many core processors in an elegant way.

Enjoy part 1. Part 2 is here.

Joe Duffy and Igor Ostrovsky: Parallel LINQ under the hood

Charles — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:32:00 GMT

Continuing our Parallel Computing Platform and the folks who think it up and build it, we sit down with software developers Joe Duffy (he wrote the original Parallel LINQ Think Week paper that Bill Gates read and obviously enjoyed!) and Igor Ostrovsky (he spends his time implementing PLINQ and associated technologies) to deeply dig into how PLINQ works and what makes it tick from a parallel processing point of view.

Lots of whiteboarding and great conversation in this one, as is usual with the people helping to shape our general purpose parallel computing development platform.

Enjoy.

Low res file here.

Joe Duffy, Huseyin Yildiz, Daan Leijen, Stephen Toub - Parallel Extensions: Inside the Task Parallel

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

Joe Duffy, Huseyin Yildiz, Daan Leijen, Stephen Toub and I gathered in a conference room in building 122 to dig into the Task Parallel Library infrastructure. You've heard about the Parallel Computing Platform a few months ago in an interview with Click here for the low res download.

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.

Low res file for the bandwidth-challenged.

Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework - ParallelFX

JeffBarnes — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:22:00 GMT

Jeff Barnes presents an Architect Point of View (arcPOV) presentation on ParallelFX - the Parallel extensions to the .NET framework currently in CTP. In this segment, Jeff provides a brief oveview of this exciting new breakthrough in muti-core processing using the .NET framework and shares with you some of his findings for the potential performance gains that this framework extension provides on dual and quad-core machines.

ParallelFX: Task and friends

Daniel Moth — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:32:00 GMT

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth :-)

Introduction: In this 25' exploration of the heart of the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework, you will learn how to use Tasks and how they relate to TaskManagers (including creation options, cancellation and policies).

Video download: Click on the image to play the video (from a streaming file). If you'd prefer to download the wmv packaged in a zip file, you may do so here.

Parallel LINQ (PLINQ)

Daniel Moth — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:36:00 GMT

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth :-)

Introduction: Achieving "Declarative Data Parallelism" with the Parallel Extensions is achieved through Parallel LINQ (PLINQ). This 20' video explains how to parallelise your LINQ queries, how it works under the covers and how to configure it for advanced scenarios.

Video download: Click on the image to play the video (from a streaming file). If you'd prefer to download the wmv packaged in a zip file, you may do so here.

How to use the static Parallel class

Daniel Moth — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:33:00 GMT

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth :-)

Introduction: The .NET incarnation of the solution to "imperative data parallelism" lives in the static Parallel class of the Parallel Extensions assembly. If that sentence confuses you a bit, watch the 20' video for the full explanation.

Video download: Click on the image to play the video (from a streaming file). If you'd prefer to download the wmv packaged in a zip file, you may do so here.

Intro to Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework

Daniel Moth — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:29:00 GMT

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth :-)

Introduction: In this 20’ tour of the Parallel Extensions sample code, you will learn where to focus your energy when you explore the samples. Watch this video in order to see how Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework fit in the large picture and what goal it aims to solve.

Video download: Click on the image to play the video (from a streaming file). If you'd prefer to download the wmv packaged in a zip file, you may do so here.

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.