Videochat with Microsoft's Steve Teixeira about Parallel Programming

By Michael J Huelskoetter (90 posts) on November 10, 2009 at 6:21 am

This morning I attended Steve Teixeira's tech session where he talked about parallel computing in general and about .NET 4 in particular. And as usual it was really informative what Steve had to tell us about thread pools, thread stealing, thread save parallel code and much more. For all you who haven't followed my twitter stream here are some of Steve's statements during his session:

First demo: LINQ versus PLINQ. Guess who is faster? Got it?! Yes, PLINQ is 3.3x faster.

The only difference between LINQ PLINQ is a little “AsParallel()”. Very easy, very intuitive!

ParallelEnumarable() fits perfectly for parallel computing with huge data. Think of financial applications, e.g.

There’s one important advice by Steve: Don’t use threads but tasks. .NET 4 is supporting with Parallel.Invoke() e.g.

With .NET 4 you can delay tasks in order to run them later as soon you need them.

BTW: Although Steve's session took place quite early (at least for a blogger like me), the room was completely filled with developers. This means two things: first, "multi-threading and parallel programming" is a hot topic and second, that software developers are really looking for decent information regarding parallel computing. Seems as if the time has come that people start thinking about multi-threading their serial code.

Right after his session we had the opportunity to ask Steve three questions regarding his tech talk and what managed developers can expect from .NET 4 in terms of multi-threading serial programmed applications. And he had some helpful advice for all of you who think of parallel programming in the near future. So, let the movie begin with a little mouse click.

Categories: Events, Parallel Programming
Tags:

For more complete information about compiler optimizations, see our Optimization Notice.

Comments (2)

November 10, 2009 6:46 AM PST

ajaykashyap87
ajaykashyap87Total Points:
25
Registered User
 very informative
November 10, 2009 11:22 AM PST

Gastón C. Hillar
Gastón C. HillarTotal Points:
4,424
Black Belt
 As always, Steve's statements are really informative.

Multi-threading, task-based programming and parallel programming are indeed hot topics. I'm sure Visual Studio 2010 focus on multicore will help developers realize they have to learn multicore programming skills as soon as possible.
However, most presentations make things too simple. It's not just adding an "AsParallel()".

Some LINQ queries can run slower if you run them with AsParallel() without understanding how task-based programming works. It is very important to explain developers that there is no silver bullet.

PLINQ is really cool. Nonetheless, you have to write code understanding the new rules. You have to understand many issues related to concurrency.

People who read my blogs at ISN and my posts on Dr Dobb's Go Parallel, http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel already know that I'm using Visual Studio 2010 since CTP. However, we don't have to forget about learning the new underlying hardware and the new challenges related to multicore.

This way, developers will be able to create awesome applications translating multicore power into application's performance.

Cheers,

Gaston

Trackbacks (4)


Leave a comment  

To obtain technical support, please go to Software Support.
Name (required)*

Email (required; will not be displayed on this page)*

Your URL (optional)


Comment*