Entries tagged with parallelism - 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.

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

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.

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 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.

STM.NET: Who. What. Why.

Charles — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:39:00 GMT

Software Transactional Memory is no longer a pipe dream or the stuff of academics. STM.NET, as it's called, is ready for your experimentation.

The goal of STM.NET is to be able to exploit concurrency by using components written by experts and consumed by application programmers who can then compose together these components using STM. Transactional memory provides an easy-to-use mechanism to do this safely. STM.NET is of course not a concurrency silver bullet and this is an experimental rrelease of the .NET Framework that allows C# programmers to try out this technology, specifically a particular implementation of STM.

The STM team really needs your feedback to understand if they're doing the right things to meet your needs. Traditionally, using STM for simple trasactional tasks didn't make sense. The overhead was too high. Is this still the case? What needed to change in the .NET Framework to enable STM.NET? Remember, this is a .NET Framework experiment to enable STM for managed code.

Here, we meet most of the team responsible for STM.NET: Chris Dern‎, Yossi Levanoni‎, Sasha Dadiomov‎, Weirong Zhu‎, Sukhdeep Sodhi‎ and Lingli Zhang.

Tune in, meet the team and get a good sense of what this very small team has accomplished with STM.NET and learn about some of the paths taken to get there. This represents really great engineering. Congratulations to the STM team! Now, Niners, go get the bits!

Enjoy.

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.

Axum Published! Tutorial: Building your first Axum application

Charles — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:45:00 GMT

Not familiar with Axum? Here's a C9 interview with the Axum team to refresh your memory (it's a domain specific language for concurrent programming, formerly known as "Maestro", developed by the Parallel Computing Platform team).

Here, Axum PM Josh Phillips walks us through building a simple Axum application in just over 5 minutes. Josh builds a simple “math library” on agents and shows how easy it is with Axum to focus on your code and get parallelism and safety implicitly.

Axum Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/maestroteam

-->Get Axum<--

Concurrency and Parallelism: Native (C/C++) and Managed (.NET) Perspectives

Charles — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:24:00 GMT

Parallel Computing Platform team members Stephen Toub, Rick Molloy, Don McCrady and Dana Groff join me for a chat about the differences and similarities in their conceptual approach to designing and building concurrent programming abstractions targeting .NET developers and native (C/C++) developers.

Besides the obvious semantic (and runtime) differences between purely managed (.NET) and native code (C/C++), how does the Parallel Computing Platform team develop technologies for each domain and how are these technologies different? Surely, system level developers need system level tooling support that can improve their experience with writing native code that can effectively (and safely) scale to 8 cores (and that's nothing. How many cores will be the norm in 5-8 years? Mostly likely significantly more than 8....). There’s no PLINQ for C++, for example. That said, the fundamental problems the Parallel Computing Platform team are trying to solve span languages and runtimes, but are the differences only in implementation details and programming abstractions? What's the same? What's different? How? Why?

This is another great conversation with some of the folks designing and building technologies that will ultimately, in one form or another, converge into tools (or components of tools) that will help software developers effectively, efficiently and reliably compose applications and services in a Many Core world.

Enjoy!

Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Charles — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:16:00 GMT

It's always a pleasure to get a chance to sit down and geek out with Anders Hejlsberg. Anders is a Microsoft Technical Fellow (a Technical Fellow is the highest ranking technical position at Microsoft) and programming language design master. He's the creator of C# and one of the founders of .NET. Anders is an expert language design craftsman. C# is one of the most popular languages Microsoft has created and certainly the most widely used language by developers who target the .NET platform.

Erik Meijer, Expert to Expert host, programming language designer and occasionally-radical category theoritician, has spent many years working with Anders and the C# team. As you may know, Erik has been a key contributor to the addition of functional constructs to C#.

Here, Erik and Anders wax on topics ranging from the design of C# 4.0's dynamic keyword (what's the thinking behind the thinking) to the potential near and far future of the C# language (and general purpose imperative programming, generally). Anders also spends some time at the whiteboard explaining C# 4.0's support for covariance and contravariance. Of course, we can't forget about concurrency and parallelism, so we don't.

As you might expect, the conversation takes some interesting jaunts into various programming language design rabbit holes. For example, Anders discusses the notion of creating a new language to support new problem domains versus extending current languages to meet the needs of developers who need to express solutions to complex problems (so, how do you make a language like C# more dynamic in the sense that it can readily help developers solve problems that the language was not initially designed to solve?). We talk about the work being done on a service-oriented C# compiler (compiler as a service), C# as an ESDL container (or as an EDSL itself to be hosted in other environments...) and much more. This is a fantastic conversation with some of Microsoft's true visionaries. Enjoy.

Expert to Expert: Inside Concurrent Basic (CB)

Charles — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:09:00 GMT

"Concurrent Basic extends Visual Basic with stylish asynchronous concurrency constructs derived from the join calculus. Our design advances earlier MSRC work on Polyphonic C#, Comega and the Joins Library. Unlike its C# based predecessors, CB adopts a simple event-like syntax familiar to VB programmers, allows one to declare generic concurrency abstractions and provides more natural support for inheritance. CB also offers open extensibility based on custom attributes."

Code Sample:

Module Buffer

Public Asynchronous Put(ByVal s As String)

Public Synchronous Take() As String

Private Function CaseTakeAndPut(ByVal s As String) As String When Take, Put

Return s

End Function

End Module

OK. Sounds great. There are new keywords, Asynchronous and Synchronous. Conceptually, these are easy enough to understand. How do they work, exactly? What's the thinking behind the current design? Why was VB.NET chosen as the language to extend? Wouldn't any CLI language suffice? Who thought this up, anyway? What's the thinking behind the thinking?

Enter C9 celebrity host Erik Meijer, who leads yet another great conversation with fellow software experts Claudio Russo (MSR Researcher and co-creator of Concurrent Basic) and Lucian Wischik (software developer and current VB.NET Czar).

Obviously, we've been focusing a lot of attention of Concurrency and Parallelism over the past few years. We talk about the library versus language approach quite a bit. In this case, concurrency constructs have been baked into the language to form a different variant of VB, CB (Concurrent Basic). CB is a research project and therefore a research language. It has no ship vehicle and is not available for trial at this point. Microsoft makes no committment to shipping VB with these concurrency constructs built in. CB is a research language. CB is being shown in action at this year's MSR TechFest. Be sure to check out Laura's coverage of TechFest 2009.

Expert to Expert - Joe Duffy: Perspectives on Concurrent Programming and Parallelism

Charles — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:39:00 GMT

Joe Duffy spends a lot of time thinking about the future of concurrent programming and parallelism. In his role as Lead Developer in the Parallel Computing Platform team, Joe is the creator of PLINQ and a key contributor to many of the managed (.NET) concurrency incubations happening in and around his broader team. He's also an author (check out his latest book, Concurrent Programming on Windows)

You've met Joe many times before on C9 and the concurrency topic should be quite familiar to you by now (There's a lot of very innovative thinking going on in the parallel computing platform team (and it's not just about the managed world, as you know)).

We've spent a lot time discussing library-based approaches to enabling parallelism in a readily understanable, predictable, safe and scalable way for .NET programmers. We've also spent time on language level approaches to the problem (new constructs in C# that make it easier to compose in a semi-functional way (lamdas, LINQ, etc) or purely in a hybrid-functional way in F# or with experimental DSLs like Maestro).

Erik Meijer, Expert to Expert host, programming language designer and one of the high priests of the lamda calculus spends a great deal of time thinking about the problem of software's capability to scale effectively (as efficiently, safely, and as composable as possible) in the Many-Core age. So, we add Joe + Erik and we get many excellent, insightful questions and answers. Of course the notion of side-effects plays a big role here and we even debate the merits of Haskell in the real world. This is a great conversation. It goes deep, but not so far into the rabbit hole that you won't be able to find your way back. :)

Enjoy!

Dave Probert: Inside Windows 7 - User Mode Scheduler (UMS)

Charles — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:11:00 GMT

Here, we continue our exploration of the morphology of Windows 7 on Going Deep with windows kernel architect Dave Probert. You may remember him from an early four part episode of Going Deep where he teaches us about general purpose operating system architectures and history: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

That was a great conversation from a few years ago and it's been way too long since we returned to Windows kernel world to converse with and learn from Dr. Probert. Not surprisingly, Dave has been busy innovating the Windows core.

Dave and team, working very closely with the Parallel Computing Platform People, have created a very compelling new user mode thread scheduling/management system in Windows 7. In a nutshell, the User Mode Scheduler provides a new model for high-performance applications to control the execution of threads by allowing applications to schedule, throttle and control the overhead due to blocking system calls. In other words, applications can switch user threads completely in user mode without going through the kernel level scheduler. This frees up the kernel thread scheduler from having to block unnecessarily, which is a very good thing as we move into the age of Many-Core... Speaking of Many-Core, remember the piece we did on the Concurrency Runtime (ConcRT)? ConcRT is built on top of UMS and is the best way to most effectively utilize this new user mode thread scheduling model in Windows 7.

Make yourself comfortable and spend some time watching and listening to Dave make all of this crystal clear.

This is another great conversation with a fantastic OS architect and Windows kernel professor. Lots to learn here. Enjoy.

MSDN Radio - SOA och parallellism

Johan Lindfors — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:19:00 GMT

Ett samtal över nätet om SOA (intervju med Sten Sundblad), Parallellism, Asynkron programmering och mycket annat.

Medverkande

Länkar

Expert to Expert: Meijer and Chrysanthakopoulos - Concurrency, Coordination and the CCR

Charles — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:56:00 GMT

In this episode of Expert to Expert, programming language designer Erik Meijer chats with CCR creator George Chrysanthakopoulos. We've spent a good deal of time on Channel 9 addressing the Concurrency Problem and the various approaches Microsoft is taking in an effort to help solve it. George's CCR is a piece of managed technology (.NET) that provides an unusually high degree of concurrency for developers targeting Windows. The Coordination and Concurrency Runtime has been around for about five years. How are people using it today to build scalable concurrent systems? What's the current state of the CCR and what's it's future? Why is the CCR a better approach to scalable distributed concurrent programming than other technologies out there? Is concurrency the real issue? George believes that it's all about coordination(the other C in CCR) and concurrency is really just a side effect of coordinating systems. If you get distributed coordination right, then you have a concurrent system that can scale. Really? Do explain, dear George (oh, and he does and as passionately as you'd expect from him). This is a fantastic conversation. Classic Channel 9.

Enjoy!

Parallel Computing in Native Code: New Trends and Old Friends

Charles — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:48:00 GMT

We've covered a lot of ground on both C++ and Parallel Computing on Channel 9 over the past few years. For C++ in particular, we've gone deep on many fronts with some of the main players in Microsoft's native programming world. Damien Watkins is one of these players and he's the brains behind most of the interviews you've seen on C9 (he thought them up and set them up). But who is Damien and what does he do?

Rick Molloy (PM) and Don McCrady(Development Lead) have been on Channel 9 before and they are both members of the native side of the parallel computing platform (PCP) house. It's no surprise that most teams who ship Microsoft software work closely with the C++ team given that most of our products are written in native code. The C++ team produces the de facto compiler that most teams at MS use. The PCP team is no exception.

We figured it would be fun to get a C++ player (Damien is a PM on the front-end native compiler team) and some Parallel People together in a room to discuss the native side of the Concurrency Problem (and possible solutions) and get a feel for the synergy between teams. The next version of C++, C++0x, will undoubtedly contain new language constructs that will make it easier to program many-core algorithms. We dig into some of these here as well as reveal for the first time on C9 some new members of the C++ language that you may not have heard about yet....

Enjoy. This is a great conversation among key thinkers who live in and innovate the native world.

Maestro: A Managed Domain Specific Language For Concurrent Programming

Charles — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:46:00 GMT

Josh Phillips(PM), Niklas Gustafsson(Architect), and Artur Laksberg(Developer) of the Parallel Computing Platform Team spend some time with me to discuss a managed (.NET-based) DSL (Domain Specific Language) for concurrent programming, Maestro. Maestro incorporates well-entrenched language patterns (imperative, OO, C style syntax, etc) and language constructs (channels, agents, domains) in a compelling way to make concurrent composition more accessible and familiar to the legions of sequential code composers.

Here we dig into the architecture and design of the Maestro language and compiler as well as discuss the philosophy behind this incubation project (at this point in time there are no plans to release Maestro as a product - it's a research project, an incubation...). Why create another language to help solve the Concurrency Problem? What's the advantage over implementing a library (this is .NET after all -> CLR + BCL = most of the power of the platform)? There's obviously good reasons for implementig Maestro as a language, but you'll need to watch and listen to find out.

Enjoy.

Note: After this interview was conducted and posted to Channel 9, the Maestro team has renamed their technology to Axum. So, they are now the Axum team and the managed DSL for concurrent programming they're incubating is called Axum. :)

ARCast.TV - Pat Helland on Memories, Guesses and Apologies

Bob Familiar — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:52:00 GMT

Part 2 of Patrick Weikle's interview with Pat Helland where he talks about the framing of unreliability and eventual consistency of transactions.

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.

Native Parallelism with the Parallel Patterns Library

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 Rick Molloy, Program Manager on the Parallel Computing Platform team.

Rick takes us on a tour of the new parallelism features coming with C++ 10 via the Parallel Patterns Library. Covered are features like task groups, structured task groups, and agents-based parallelism, among many others.

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.

Debugging Parallel Applications with Visual Studio 2010

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 Daniel Moth, Senior Program Manager on the Parallel Computing Platform team.

In this video, Daniel shows us what is being done in order to make debugging of parallel applications easier than it has been before. Covered are features like the new Parallel Tasks and Parallel Stacks windows, among others.

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.

ARCast.TV - Pat Helland on the Drive to Many-Core Processors

Bob Familiar — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:13:00 GMT

Patrick Weikle interviews Pat Helland about the inevitability of ManyCore and parallel applications.

Research: Concurrency Analysis Platform and Tools for Finding Concurrency Bugs

System — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:39:25 GMT

Learn about the Concurrency Analysis Platform (CAP) from Microsoft Research and how it enables various concurrency bug-finding tools. See a demo of CHESS, a tool built on CAP for finding and reproducing Heisenbugs. Also hear about future tools from Microsoft Research, including a lightweight data-race detection engine and a tool for finding memory-model errors.

Thomas Ball
Thomas Ball is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research where he manages the Software Reliability Research group (http://research.microsoft.com/srr/). Tom has been at Microsoft Research since 1999. He is one of the originators of the SLAM project, a software model checking engine for C that forms the basis of the Static Driver Verifier tool, made freely available by Microsoft for finding defects in device drivers. Tom's interests range from program analysis, model checking, testing and automated theorem proving to the problems of defining and measuring software quality.
Madan Musuvathi
Madan Musuvathi is a Researcher at Microsoft Research and is interested in building program analysis tools to improve the productivity of developers and testers. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2004.

The Concurrency and Coordination Runtime and Decentralized Software Services Toolkit

System — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:39:18 GMT

Get an overview of Microsoft's CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008 and the technologies it contains for building loosely-coupled, highly concurrent, and distributed applications. Learn how the technologies are already being used and get a run-down of how to evaluate whether the technologies may be right for you.

George Chrysanthakopoulos