Entries tagged with software composability - Channel 9

Software Transactional Memory: The Current State of the Art

Charles — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:19:00 GMT

A few years ago I got the chance to learn about Software Transactional Memory for the first time while visiting MSR Cambridge. The great Simon Peyton-Jones and Tim Harris explained to me the thinking behind STM and how it might evolve. It was a tremendously interesting conversation. If you haven't watched that interview, I highly recommend it as a precursor to this one. Today, STM is no longer only a research project. The Parallel Computing Platform team is incubating and extending the technology, finding that it may in fact work in the real world...

Of course, there is no silver bullet to solving the Concurrency Problem, but STM may be an important part of a larger solution (you've leraned a great deal about what Microsoft is up to in the concurrency and parallelism space here on Channel 9 and it should be somewhat clear by now that many of the technologies we've presented to you may end up as pieces of a broader solution...)

Here, STM Program Manager Dana Groff and STM Principal Developer Lead Yossi Levanoni discuss the current state of STM and outline the work their team is doing to craft this incubation/research technology into a practical real-world solution (STM is not available yet for experimentation. It's in incubation. It's not known if or when STM will become a viable product.). So, how has STM evolved over the past two years, anyway? Tune in.

Enjoy.

Dan Reed: On the ManyCore Future and Parallelism in the Sky

Charles — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:42:12 GMT

Dan Reed is Microsoft's Director of Scalable/Multi-Core Systems Research and head of the recently formed Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC): one at the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) and a second at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Since we've been here) but part of the same wide-angle general purpose solution to the complex (and arguably fractal) general problem that spans microblips in DRAM to massive data centers.

Certainly the computation Cloud of the future must not only be scalable and highly performant, but also adaptive and homeostatic in how it reacts to frequent perturbation.

What are some of the challenges on the server side with respect to concurrent processing and massive scalability? Clustered server computing environments have traditionally been very good at parallel computation (compared to the general purpose client) so what's Dan and Microsoft working on to ensure our Cloud scales to ManyCore? Is machine learning being incorporated into clustered computing software adaptation and evolution?

Dan has a very interesting biography:

"Previously, I was the founding director of the Renaissiance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina, the Chancellor's Eminent Professor, and Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation. Before that, I was head of the Department of Computer Science, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor, and Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.
I am also a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA)"

Dan was the head of CS at Illinois during the birth of the web browser Mosaic which changed the way people interact with the Internet forever... We talk about where the web is today (including browsers) versus what Mosaic enabled when it arrived.

Enjoy. This is another great discussion with a supercomputing stalwart whose main focus these days is on ensuring we are prepared for the highly parallel future of general purpose computation in the sky.

Low res file here.

Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Bertrand Meyer - Objects, Contracts, Concurrency, Sleeping Barbers

Charles — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:32:29 GMT

Bertrand Meyer is a programming language guru, computer scientist and arguably the uncle of object oriented programming :). Bertrand created the Eiffel programming language. Eiffel is an object-oriented language that is based on a fixed set of powerful principles like Design by Contract and Command-Query Separation. It's a very powerful language that has impacted the evolution of the more popular general purpose OO languages such as Java and C#.

With the arrival of multi-core and soon-to-arrive many-core chipsets concurrency and parallelism are top-of-mind for general purpose language designers these days. Bertrand has introduced the SCOOP model on top of Eiffel. SCOOP is a comprehensive effort to make concurrent and distributed programming simple and safe, taking advantages of Eiffel's object technology and Design by Contract.

General purpose programming language designer and passionate functional programmig advocate Erik Meijer leads the discussion in this addition of Expert to Expert. You all know great tools for software developers.

Very special guest star and famous mathematical logician Yuri Gurevich joins us for the first half of the conversation (He happened to be in Bertrand's office when we arrived - very lucky for us indeed! :)).

This is a long conversation that I hope you eenjoy as much as I do. Find yourself some quality time to listen and learn from this chat amongst some the world's finest programming thinkers.

Enjoy!

Low res file here.

Version Resilience in the Managed AddIn Framework

Daniel Moth — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:16:00 GMT

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth :-)

Introduction: In a previous non-Silverlight wmv packaged in a zip file, you may do so here.

Managed AddIn Framework

Daniel Moth — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:12:00 GMT

Author: Hi, I am Daniel Moth :-)

Introduction: The Managed AddIn Framework (MAF) is a set of assemblies that are part of .NET Framework v3.5. They offer a platform for developers to build extensibility into their client applications by enabling addins (aka plugins) to be written for a host. In this 18' video you will learn how to use the MAF. The code is available from my blog.

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

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.

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!

Lo-Res version for the bandwidth challanged.

Brian Beckman: Don't fear the Monad

Charles — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 18:28:00 GMT

Functional programming is increasing in popularity these days given the inherent problems with shared mutable state that is rife in the imperative world. As we march on to a world of multi and many-core chipsets, software engineering must evolve to better equip software engineers with the tools to exploit the vast power of multiple core processors as it won't come for free as it did in the recent past which was predictably based on Moore's law.

Of course, learning new ways to think about programming semantics and code patterns are not always straight forward. For example, most imperative programmers (which include most of us who build software for a living...) are somewhat perplexed by the notion of functions as first class data structures that can be combined to create powerful and composable systems. Languages like Haskell are pure functional languages and require programmers to think in a different way, often in a precise mathematical fashion where composing and chaining functions is "the Way".

Dr. Brian Beckman, a Channel 9 celebrity, astrophysicist and senior software engineer thought it would be a very good idea to address the complexity of monads in an easy to understand way: a technical conversation at the whiteboard with yours truly for Channel 9.

This video interview is the result of Brian's idea that he can in fact remove the fear of monads from anybody who pays attention to his explanation. Of course, you can't just cover monads in a vacuum (category theory is not really addressed here) so the context is functional programming (Brian covers functions and composable functional structures (function chains) and of course monoids and then monads).

Tune in. There's a lot to learn here and only Brian can make monads easy to understand for the rest of us!

Happy Thanksgiving to all the US Niners out there.

Enjoy.

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.

Raj Jhanwar: Windows Vista Component Management Interface (CMI)

Charles — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:02:09 GMT

Ever wonder how we make Windows skus (not why necessarily, though we do cover that briefly, but how, exactly)? How do OEMs like Dell or HP or Whoever get Windows skus onto the millions of PCs they make? Closer to home, how does Microsoft build Windows skus, anyway? How do we build Windows for that matter?

Did you know that Windows Vista introduces a completely new model that effectively componentizes the build and installation process of Windows? Did you know that that Windows Vista contains information about every component dependency that ships with the OS? Did you know that Windows Update will no longer be enabled to install components that break things because of unforseen dependencies? This is HUGE.

Meet Raj Jhanwar, a Program Manager in Windows. He and team have been working on CMI since XP shipped. What is CMI? Tune in. Learn. There are some nuggets of information in this interview that most of you have never heard about before...

Anders Hejlsberg, Herb Sutter, Erik Meijer, Brian Beckman: Software Composability and the Future of

Charles — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 04:32:00 GMT

How will imperative programming languages evolve to suit the needs of developers in the age of Concurrency and Composability? What role can programming languages play in enabling true composability? What are the implications of LINQ on the furture of managed (CLS-based) and unmanaged(C++) languages? How will our imperative languages (static) become more functional (dynamic) in nature while preserving their static "experience" for developers?

Answers to these questions and much more are to be found in this interview with some of Microsoft's leading language designers and programming thought leaders: Anders Hejlsberg, Technical Fellow and Chief Architect of C#, Herb Sutter, Architect in the C++ language design group, Erik Meijer, Architect in both VB.Net and C# language design and programming language guru, and Brian Beckman, physicist and programming language architect working on VB.Net.

This is a great conversation with some of the industry's most influential programming language designers. Tune in. You may be surprised by what you learn...

MSR Cambridge Tour: Machine Learning Group, Computer Vision and F#

Charles — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 17:32:02 GMT

While in Cambridge recently to you've seen him before).

There's a lot of incredible work going on in MSR Cambridge. Come along and meet some the people working on next generation computing technologies.

Don Syme: Introduction to F#, Part 2

Charles — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 17:59:56 GMT

The conversation Mike Hall recently had with Don Syme, a researcher at MSR Cambridge who focuses on language development and is the key author of F#, continues. (Don's blog!

Don Syme: Introduction to F#, Part 1

Charles — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:18:52 GMT

Mike Hall caught up with Don Syme recently and recorded a few interviews covering Don's favorite programming language: F#. F#???

Don has done many great things over there in MSR Cambridge including creating everybody's favorite C# feature, Generics. Well, he also developed (with his team) the "research" programming language, F#.

"F# is a programming language that provides the much sought-after combination of type safety, performance and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system."

Check out Don's blog!

Programming in the Age of Concurrency: Software Transactional Memory

Charles — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 20:51:39 GMT

Recently, we visited MSR Cambridge(UK) to meet some of the great minds working there. In this case, we were fortunate enough to get an hour's time with Simon Peyton-Jones and Tim Harris, who are researchers working on a very hard problem: making it easier (more predictable, more reliable, more composable) to write concurrent applications in this the age of Concurrency (multi-core is a reality, not a dream).

Specifically, Simon and Tim (and team) are working on a programming technology called Software Transactional Memory (STM) which provides an elegant, easy to use language-level abstraction for writing concurrent applications that is based on widely-understood conceptual constructs like Atomic operations (and, well, Transactions...). Simon, Tim and team do all the nasty locking work for you. With STM-enabled languages, you can just concentrate on the algorithms at hand and leave the low-level heavy lifting to the sub-system. Sound familiar?

So, imagine this:

atomic
{
//do stuff - if failure, then throw ex out
//of block, roll back - this is a transaction...
}

/*next code fragment... So, code flow appears sequential to the programmer(as we would expect), even though under the covers it is of course not always processing sequentially*/

Read scientific papers here.

Play with STM here and here.

[My apologies for the somewhat shaky camera work. This conversation took place shortly after the terrorist scare at London's Heathrow airport (I had to leave some of my camera equipment in New Delhi)]

Brian Beckman: Monads, Monoids, and Mort

Charles — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 17:34:24 GMT

Brian Beckman is a fascinating individual. Ex-cosmologist, ex-military operating system and simulation developer (have you ever considered processes that move both forward and backward in time? Well, Brian and team at JPL created just that. He explains in this interview...). Brian was one of the first members of Microsoft Research and one of a group of physicists who joined Microsoft in the early 90s. At Microsoft he is a passionate advocate for Mort, the somewhat ambiguous class name for novice developers. In fact, he considers himself a mort (somewhat hard to believe, honestly, but we'll go along with it...). His team works on innovative incubation projects that turn into developer platform features (like LINQ, for example) and more. Tune in to this very interesting interview.

Brainbec's Weblog

Programming in the Age of Concurrency: The Accelerator Project

Charles — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 16:58:45 GMT

David Tarditi and Sidd Puri are doing some really cool work over in Microsoft Research. They've built a development technology, Accelerator, that "provides a high-level data-parallel programming model as a library that is available for all .Net programming languages. The library translates the data-parallel operations on-the-fly to optimized GPU pixel shader code and API calls. Future versions will target multi-core cpus." Watch this video!

Download the Accelerator library and SDK!

Check out the here.

Singularity III: Revenge of the SIP

Adam Kinney — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 21:16:17 GMT

It's been a while since we checked in with the Singularity folks over in MSR Redmond. You know, the usual suspects like Jim Larus and Galen Hunt. So, Charles went and visited them recently to see where they are with Singularity, see what they're up to, what's new... As you may expect, they are doing some really interesting work with, among other novel software constructs, SIPs (Software Isolated Processes). Learn all about them and how they are architected into the Singularity system. Yes, we get Galen on the whiteboard again. This time, you will also meet the newest member of the Singularity team, Mark Aiken, Software Developer, who's been working on some interesting hardware protection stuff in Singularity. It's always great to spend time with the Singularity folks. Oh yeah, this time we get Erik Meijer is a computer science professor turned Microsoft Architect. He is responsible for things like helping to make VB.NET a great development language that supports constructs other managed languages can't or working on LINQ for C# and much more. He also leads an incubation team working on some really cool progamming technology that promises to democratize the internet cloud. What does that mean? Watch or listen to find out.

This is a great conversation with a software tools and languages visionary. Enjoy.

Microsoft Platform Vision in the Post Bill Era: Meet Craig Mundie

Charles — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 19:47:00 GMT

As you may recall, last month Bill Gates CCR) with George Chrysanthakopoulos? What about our discussion with the team that implemented a robotics framework on top of it (Concurrent Affairs to learn more about the new, improved CCR API and get a hold of sample code to play with. Also, see http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2006/07/11/662447.aspx

Screencast demo’ing ADO.NET vNext in action: http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2006/07/11/662454.aspx

ADO.NET team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/

Data Programmability team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/data/

Britt’s first blog post (recent) sharing his thoughts on conceptual schema: http://blogs.msdn.com/data/archive/2006/07/14/665780.aspx

MSDN Data Developer Center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime

Charles — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 19:33:11 GMT

The Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) is a lightweight port-based concurrency library for C# 2.0 developed by George Chrysanthakopoulos in the Advanced Strategies group at Microsoft. Here, we have a deep discussion about CCR with George, a Software Architect, and Satnam Singh, Architect. You can get more info about CCR on the OOPSLA/SCOOL paper on the CCR.

Click