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Gastón C. Hillar

I've been working with computers since I was eight. I began programming with the legendary Texas TI-99/4A and Commodore 64 home computers in the early 80s. I have a Bachelor degree in Computer Science, and an MBA (Master in Business Administration) I have worked as developer, architect, and project manager. Now, I am an independent IT consultant, and a freelance author. I am always researching about new technologies. I am researching about parallel programming, multiprocessor and multicore since 1997. Packt Publishing has recently published my book "C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming: Beginner's Guide". In a few words: I love this game! You can drop me a few lines at gastonhillar at the domain hotmail.com. The views expressed on my posts and comments are mine alone. Intel (R) does not pay me for posting in this blog.

Installing Intel® Parallel Advisor Lite on Windows 7

By Gastón C. Hillar (11 posts) on October 7, 2009 at 8:54 am
Comments (2)

Many Windows developers stayed in Windows XP instead of upgrading their developer workstations to Windows Vista. Windows Vista introduced some compatibility problems when installing certain applications. Now, Windows 7 is round the corner and many developer workstations are going to move to this new Windows version. Windows 7 has many improvements over Vista. Nonetheless, it [...]

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Category: Parallel Programming, What If Software

Changing partitions in Windows XP Home in order to install Moblin v2.0 Beta

By Gastón C. Hillar (11 posts) on September 1, 2009 at 11:26 am
Comments (2)

A few weeks ago, I finished converting projects from Silverlight 3 Beta 1 to Silverlight 3 RTW. It took me more time than expected. Working with Beta versions is a difficult task. However, I’ve been working with Apha and Beta versions in the last 20 years. I guess I cannot live without Betas. :) In the [...]

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Category: Mobility, Parallel Programming

Using Intel Parallel Studio to teach the most difficult issues related to multi-core programming

By Gastón C. Hillar (11 posts) on June 10, 2009 at 9:34 am
Comments (4)

As my blogger profile says, I’m always researching about new tools and technologies. Therefore, I couldn’t help downloading and testing Intel Parallel Studio’s Beta. I’m usually involved in projects using many different programming languages. I’m not a C++ guru. However, I often work with unmanaged C++ when I want the best performance for a parallelized algorithm. As [...]

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Category: Parallel Programming

Silverlight 3 Beta 1 Multi-core programming possibilities using C#

By Gastón C. Hillar (11 posts) on May 21, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Comments (3)

In my previous post “Use lambda expressions in C# to simplify the parallelized code II”, Eduardo Fernandez added a comment asking me whether Silverlight 3 Beta 1 had support for multithreading. I’m adding this post to let you know the possibilities offered by Silverlight 3 Beta 1 to create RIAs that take advantage of multi-core [...]

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Category: Parallel Programming

Use lambda expressions in C# to simplify the parallelized code II

By Gastón C. Hillar (11 posts) on May 19, 2009 at 9:55 am
Comments (5)

In my previous post “Use lambda expressions in C# to simplify the parallelized code” I began talking about the advantages of using lambda expressions in parallelized code. I used a very simple example. Now, I’m going to use a more complex example to convince you that lambda expressions and parallelized code are good friends. In this [...]

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Category: Parallel Programming

Use lambda expressions in C# to simplify the parallelized code

By Gastón C. Hillar (11 posts) on May 13, 2009 at 10:57 am
Comments (1)

So, you want to start using Task Parallel Library Beta 1. You want to take advantage of the new features that will be available in .Net 4.0. Hold on! Are you familiar with lambda expressions? If you aren’t using lambda expressions in your current C# programs, you should begin learning about them before jumping into the [...]

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Category: Parallel Programming

Specifying the desired degree of parallelism in .Net 4.0 TPL Beta 1

By Gastón C. Hillar (11 posts) on May 6, 2009 at 7:20 am
Comments (2)

Sometimes, you don’t want to use all the available cores in a parallel loop. Why? Because you have better plans for the remaining available cores. Thus, you want to specify the concurrency level of a parallel loop. Luckily, Task Parallel Library Beta 1 will allow you to do this using the new ParallelOptions class. This is [...]

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Category: Parallel Programming

Counting cores in .Net and Java

By Gastón C. Hillar (11 posts) on May 4, 2009 at 7:04 am
Comments (13)

As C# and Visual Basic (in the .Net world) and Java are high level programming languages, most developers were not used to check for some hardware information. With multicore microprocessors and a task-oriented programming model, trying to take full advantage of parallel processing capabilities offered by modern microprocessors, this is changing. I'm preparing a sequence of [...]

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Category: Parallel Programming, Uncategorized

Invoking parallel tasks

By Gastón C. Hillar (11 posts) on April 28, 2009 at 7:50 am
Comments (2)

In a recent post, Robert Chesebrough (Intel) talked about less focus on threads and more focus on tasks. I agree with him. I do believe that decomposing the job to be done into many tasks is the key to a successfully parallelized algorithm. Once you have the most important tasks, you can re-design the algorithm taking [...]

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Category: Parallel Programming

Parallel Extensions offer backward compatibility

By Gastón C. Hillar (11 posts) on April 22, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Comments (4)

Many developers are working with the features offered by C# 3.0 and .Net 3.5 to exploit multi-core CPUs. Parallel Extensions, which will be part of .Net 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010 are entering Beta 1. Luckily, they will offer backward compatibility. Parallel Extension will offer a lot of interesting features related to multi-core programming. So, developers [...]

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Category: Parallel Programming

Concurrent collections for C# using Parallel Extensions

By Gastón C. Hillar (11 posts) on April 8, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Comments (4)

One of the most difficult tasks related to concurrent programming in C# and .Net 3.5 is sharing collections, arrays or lists between many tasks running at the same time. Besides, the complexity increases when these concurrent tasks need to add and/or remove items from them. Doing this safely involves a great control of coordination data [...]

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Category: Parallel Programming