So what you'll find in this 9:30 minutes videocast is a workshop how you as a .NET developer can use Intel VTune Performance Analyzer to find critical hot spots in your source code which need more computing power than necessary. So with the help of VTune you'll find the parts of your application which need to be optimized in order to run best on a dual or multicore system. So, just watch and listen to Rami's very good workshop showing the necessary steps to detect the critical sections within your source code. And yes, after you have found these sections you can parallelize the code with only a few steps.

So, please start the videocast and make sure that you watch it in full screen mode so that you can see all relevant scenes.

The first interesting statement Ralf made was related to the fact that software developers have to take care of multi-threading their apps themselves instead of letting the operating system do this job alone. Furthermore he talked about the well-known statement of Herb Sutter who said in 2005: "The free lunch is over". What this means can be summarized quite shortly:

As the processor frequencies won't increase any more but the numbers of available core per system will, software developers have to think about parallel programming in order to accelerate their apps in the future.

Believing in Ralf (and I do so) parallel programming stands for the following things:

Reduced latency, higher performance, hiding latency, higher responsivness and increased throughput.

Right after this list Ralf asked two rhetorical questions which you can answer quite easily within a few seconds:

Does firing up as many threads as cores are available help to accelerate apps? No, because this will cause threads waiting!

Does firing up as many threads as needed helps to accelerate apps? No, because it doesn’t scale!

Then he talked very detailed about the Concurrency Coordination Runtime and how you can compare it to task management via e-mail where you send somebody a task which he or she performs instantly or even later. That's what Ralf calls asynchronous multi-threading. Following statements fit perfectly to this:

Concurrency Coordination Runtime (CCR) helps to let data flow around and make thus asynchronous apps possible

 

Parallel Computing is all about cooperative multitasking where you have to think about small processes and steps

Afterwards Ralf showed us a very comprehensive demonstration of the CCR in conjuction with several coding examples. Unfortunately this demo was far too long to show completely and that would not have been very helpful. But what I've heard, Microsoft will put all the sessions online. As soon as this happens I will link the related webcast to this blog post.

After his presentation we asked Ralf three questions which had to do with his tech sessions at Microsoft Tech-Ed and with the CCR and how it can help .NET developers to multi-thread their apps. Question number three was related to a real exciting news he talked about for the very first time in public. So please enjoy the show!

Ever wonder what would happen if you gathered your community's most wild & crazy (and influential!) developers together and let them present whatever they want for 5-minutes in front of a large audience?  We'll be finding out on November 11 @ 6PM at the second Developer Ignite event in Gilbert, AZ!  From Javascript to crowdsourcing, GPS to database refactoring, and agility to webhooks -- it's all loud, proud, and NERDY ... for 5-minutes at a time.

Developer Ignite is presented in the O'Reilly "Ignite" format, and if you're never watched an Ignite event before, it is quite entertaining.  Each presenter gets 20 slides that change after 15 seconds; making each presentation last for exactly 5 minutes.  You have to be quick and to the point with no frills!  Presenters will tell you it's all about practice and choosing your words wisely to get your point across in 5 minutes, which is sometimes difficult with a topic as complicated as immutability!

If you're local in Arizona, definitely come down and watch the show on November 11th; find all the details at intel.com/software/ignite.  And even if you're not in Arizona, don't worry - we've got you covered.  Follow our Socialping live Twitter feed wall, view the photos on our Facebook fan page (click the Photos tab after the event), and view the event video on our webpage.  You can also download some snazzy backgrounds for your viewing pleasure (at the top of our webpage)!

Developers, get ready to IGNITE!

But I have to say that his session was more of a workshop than a presentation: No slides at all and a very interactive discussion regarding Intel, Microsoft and the multicore shift including .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Want need some quotes? 

TPL of .NET 4 delivers the right number of threads regarding the available number of cores

It takes about 200.000 instruction cycles to create a thread and 100.000 for releasing it again. As a developer you have to take this into account!

TPL delivers several parallel classes like Parallel.For() and Parallel.Invoke() which abstracts threads to tasks

Visual Studio 2010 will deliver the appropriate debugger tools for parallelized applications

What I was missing, though, was to hear about Tiberiu's vision of the future of parallel programming - the headline of the presentation. So we set up our video cam and asked Tiberiu some smart questions. These had to do with his presentation in general, with the discussion panel he attended on Monday, and by answering question number three he shared some insights how the future of parallel programming will look like.

Just as a short preview: Related to Tiberiu's words software developers have to start thinking about multi-threading NOW as the multicore era is already there. And the rest of his talk you'd better watch with the help of our video clip. So, push the button and start the show.

First of all I have to admit that there were a lot of people at Rami's tech session like the one of Steve Teixeira who took place yesterday. Interesting thing: hardly anybody of the attendees knew that Intel is not only manufacturing microprocessors. Nor did they know that there are a lot of developer tools from Intel which help to optimize their applications in terms of multithreading and multicore performance.

There were three main areas Rami was focussing on: Intel's current and future microarchtitectures, .NET 4 improvements regarding multithreading and different Intel tools like VTune Performance Analyzer which help software developers to test their apps in terms of correctness and robustness. That's why Rami said some remarkable things:

Moore’s law doesn’t help software developers anymore as frequencies aren’t going up anymore. The good news: the number of core does!

With Nehalem you get Non Uniform Memory Acess (NUMA) which connects every CPU and memory to each other which has huge advantages.

Come to Intel booth in hall 4.2 to see one of the first desktop PCs which is able to run 128 threads in parallel!

Multithreading is not equal parallelism!

Poor scaling .NET applications can be powered up with the help of Intel VTune Performance Analyzer and Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4

.NET 4 provides the Background Garbage Collection which speeds up managed code significantly.

Worker stealing within .NET 4 will help to achieve better multithreaded balanced managed applications.

VTune profiles and samples .NET applications in order to find critical code sections where a lot of computing time is being wasted

Vtune also helps identifying false sharing problems. Means VTune will detect and solve cache line misses.

To eliminate  false sharing problems helps to speed up your .NET apps on 8 core system by 70x!

One part of his presentation was related to a so called Maze Solver demo which was quite compelling. The main idea behind it is the detection of an optimal path within a two dimensional system as you can see it in logistics applications where you need to know the fastest way from A to G with B, C, D, and E in between. The algorithm which solves this problem needs a lot of computing power especially when you look at huge matrixes with 1000 by 1000 elements. In order to show the .NET 4 capabilities in conjunction with a multicore system Rami compared the Maze Solver with .NET 3.5 and .NET 4. Result: with .NET 4 the application was running two seconds faster without any code changes. And guess what: with multithreading ON it was fast as hell.

There were some quite thrilling information about VTune and .NET as well. Who thought that VTune is only suitable for native code is wrong as this profiling and sampling tool also supports .NET applications. So you can debug your serial or parallel coded apps in order to find hotspots and other buggy things. To achieve this, VTune is profiling the running programme and creates a huge number of samples which will be aggregated and assessed. As a result you can see all the possible hotspots quite quickly. A very useful tool.

And of course after his presentation we had our videocam up and running in order to ask Rami some deep dive questions like "What can developers expect when they move from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4?" and "How can VTune help software developers?" So, take a seat, grab some popcorn and enjoy the show!

With Parallel Inspector you find memory errors before they happen. Works on serial AND threaded code.

And he also named the interesting fact that

Intel Parallel Amplifier is a child of VTune Performance Analyzer, but easier and more intuitively to use. Profile you parallel code.

Right after his session Ralph drew the happy guy who received a cool Sony Vaio netbook which you could win at the Intel stand in hall 4.2. BTW: There are two more opportunities to win a new netbook. Just stop by and fill out the raffle card with the right answers. And guess what: The hallway was really crowded as everybody wanted to win this great price. And the guy who won the netbook was really happy.

As we know that seeing is believing we created a small video clip which shows Ralph's presentation and the netbook draw. Have fun watching it!

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.

The highlight of the event was the keynote by Ernest Adams, the founder and first Chairman of International Game Developers Association. In his keynote, he encouraged Indian developers to draw inspiration from India’s history and culture and design games that showcase to the world the richness of Indian culture.

The conference drew attention to the simultaneous growth witnessed across all gaming verticals in India over the past couple of years and how consumers today especially the youth is spending more on games. Currently PC & online games along with mobile games dominate the Indian gaming industry. MMORPG was projected as the natural next step to explore for gaming companies with successful PC game titles.

Udaysimha, Program Manager and Mark Kim, Engineering Manager, Intel Corporation, shared some key insights from Korean and other Asian markets on the MMORPG evolution and best practices that Indian developers can adopt. Mark and Uday had an interactive session on the technical and content considerations that game studios in India will need to keep in mind, while building online games. Many interesting conversations were triggered off and many gaming companies expressed an interest to partner with Intel. If you are a gaming ISV in India and would like to partner with us, please send us a note to software.india@intel.com

Udaysimha and Imran Khan, Vice President Technology, FX Labs in another session spoke about the recent success of Ghajini, a game title (based on a Bollywood flick) that performed very well and far exceeded sales expectation. Imran spoke extensively on the game production pipeline and shared key learnings. He focused on the need to understand the target market and the hardware they consume before progressing on the game concept and the investments to be made.  Also Imran spoke about his team’s collaboration with Intel to optimize the game. He stressed on the importance of incorporating the Quality Assurance (QA) function during the early stage of development where Intel was involved in helping his team put together a game QA lab which spanned three generations of PC platforms.

One of the other highlights was a panel discussion chaired by Dhruva Interactive's Rajesh Rao, which looked at the barriers and bottlenecks that are holding back the gaming industry in India.  The panel included Microsoft's Ashim Das Mathur, Games2win's Alok Kejriwal, Indiagames’ Samir Bangara and Sony Computer's Atindriya Bose. The discussion centered on the challenges of piracy, need to keep development costs low to ensure profitability and sell games at an affordable price tag, overcoming the negative parental mindset on gaming and the need to position game consoles as entertainment devices. Even the most promising segment of gaming on mobile phones has its own set of challenges. The addressable base is still quite small; with 60% of the mobiles phones not capable of downloading a game. Only 25% of the consumers are aware of the fact that they can download a game on their mobile phone while only 5% of them actually download games.

At the Intel booth, we gave delegates a chance to play the latest version of Resident Evil, for a taste of the Intel® Core^TM i7 gaming experience. Also showcased for the first time in India was NCSoft’s Aion, the leading MMORPG in Korea. Many gaming enthusiasts took a stab at the game and enjoyed the experience.  Overall it was a well organized event and my first brush with the gaming fraternity in India was quite exciting! The enthusiasm of the participating delegates was truly infectious!

As I announced already we will have a very close look to all the things which are related to the topic called "parallel programming". This means that we will attend and watch the 15 minutes sessions held by Ralph and Edmund who will talk about Parallel Studio in a very lively and entertaining manner. There you will learn why the developer plug-in for Visual Studio isn't capable for multi-threading only but also for debugging serial coded applications. This will help developers detecting annoying bugs which you can hardly find with most of the regular tools. But we won't also miss Rami's tech session where he will talk about the cooperation of Windows 7, .NET and multi-core optimizations.

Accepting the fact that there's a lot more things than Parallel Studio and visiting the Intel sessions we took a deep look at the session plan where we found a lot of interesting lectures. Unfortunately we won't be able to attend all of them but we will visit the most interesting ones and blog about them. And, of course, we will have our video cam ready in order to interview the important guys at Microsoft Tech-Ed Europe 2009. But you know this already, right?!

Ok, so than I'm going to say "let's have a superb Microsoft conference and let us cross fingers that nobody gets lost in this huge city which will be going crazy during next week!" You know, 20 year of the Berlin wall fall ...

But, and that's what I found really interesting are the tech sessions which cover different topics being related to the parallel programming. There are dedicated sessions regarding this:

On Monday Tiberiu Covaci will talk about "Is the future of programming a parallel one?" He will find out which chip manufacturer drive the multicore market.

On Tuesday Tiberiu will have another session with the title "Why should you care about Multi-core programming". If you are familiar with all our blog posts I'm sure you can tell the answer right away!

Tiberiu is really a busy guy as on Wednesday he will climb the stage again and present "The Future of Parallel Programming". I'm sure this man is worth getting him interviewed after one of his sessions (or beforehand).

Thank god there are other presenters who are familiar with the parallel stuff. Like Anthony Howcroft who will talk on Wednesday about "Microsoft SQL Server Project Code Name "Madison". Madison is MPP which stands for Massively Parallel Processing. Got it?!

On Wednesday our dear old friend Steve has his session with the title "Parallel Computing for Managed Developers". This sounds like real fun.

So, if you wanna learn more about parallel computing at Microsoft Tech-Ed Europe 2009 you should go to Berlin next week - or watch this space for more parallel information yet to come!

If you are going to the event next week in Berlin then let me know about it. Maybe we can meet face to face and if there are enough of us perhaps even a gourp community meeting. This can be a good opportunity to meet the experts.

In any case, you are all welcome to join my session titled "Parallel Programming for Embedded". I will be presenting on Friday 10:45 - 12:00.

At the basis of this presentation is the fact that the hardware has always been parallel. This also caused the kernel drivers to live in a parallel environment, so even though embedded devices were late to adopt Multi-Core CPUs, the people who are working with the lower levels have always been working in parallel environments.

The session speaks of parallel systems in general side by side with embedded systems and infrastructure environemnts.

The goal of this session is to open the eyes and show the systems that have always been working in parallel and name the principles used with these systems.

You can read my previous blogs to learn more about this approach. For example these:

is dos the ideal parallel environment part iv

stateful programming a case study

Here are a few slides from this presentation.

Parallel Programming for Embedded TechEd 2009

USB Ping Pong

Hope to see you all there,
Asaf

But this won't prevent us doing our job at the Microsoft event for four long days (at day five Tech-Ed has to get along without us). This means in particular:

• We will interview some of the most interesting people at the show with our video cam and blog this right away during Tech-Ed Europe 2009. This year we will try something really new: Instead of doing the live blogging in a dark and isolated chamber somewhere in one of these sad conference rooms I will sit right at the Intel stand within the Visual Studio Partner Zone and blog lively during the show. And with the help of a huge TV screen you can follow how I'm doing my job. This is nearly as good as watching a daily soap, isn't it?!

• There will be three 15 minute sessions which will be held by Intel colleagues. Their short presentations will take place at the huge show theatre. The main topic will be Intel Parallel Studio with all facets of parallel programming with native programming languages as C and C++. So you can learn how to optimize your serial coded application in order to make it as fast as possible on a multi-core system. BUT you will also learn that Parallel Studio can help developers to make their serial coded apps saver and more efficient.

In terms of code safety the Memory Checker (which is part of the Parallel Inspector) can identify critical and most likely memory leaks while running an application. This is something you'll hardly find with your known software engineering tools. Furthermore with Parallel Amplifier which belongs to Intel Parallel Studio too, it's also possible to raise the overall application performance by finding some critical bottlenecks and hotspots within the serial coded app. For example the tool identifies an often used loop which contains a huge bug and takes far too much time when being executed. As a result the application takes too much execution time than necessary. With the help of Parallel Amplifier you can eliminate that!

• Besides those parallel programming sessions you can stop by at Rami Radi's tech session. Rami will talk about how you as a developer can give "Your App a Triple Boost with Windows 7, Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Intel Multi-Core". From what I've heard his session will be fully packed with interesting insights as "How to optimize .NET code with the help of Intel VTune Performance Analyzer". But no worries: You will find all these information on this dedicated TechEd09 blog. So don't forget to bookmark it and stop by later on.

The event keynote will be delivered by Ernest Adams, the founder and first chairman of the International Game Developers' Association, who has authored various books on Game Design and often delivers sessions at GDC.

Many other companies seen as pioneers of gaming in India like FX Labs, Hyderabad, Dhruva Interactive, Bangalore, Indiagames, Mumbai, Immersive Games, Hyderabad, Ironcode Software and Interactive Media will be sharing their experiences and success stories.

Intel has been working closes with NASSCOM to energize the Indian Gaming Ecosystem and we kick started this effort with monthly webinars in June 2009. Since then we have conduct regular webinars for game developers with Industry experts and Intel Engineers on topics like Challenges of Cross Platform Game Development, Making 3D game production faster: Using scripting in 3D Studio Max, Crystal Ball Gazing into 3D Game Engine Technology and How to optimize games for PC graphics.

Continuing this association Udaysimha, Program Manager and Mark Kim, Engineering Manager, Intel Corporation will be sharing their experience and learning from the Korean and Asian markets. They will be delivering a session on Building a successful MMORPG - Technical decisions and best known methods.

Uday, Abarnaa and I will be at the Intel booth at the NAGFO Gaming and Animation Summit over the next two days and will bring you live updates. We are looking forward to spending two exciting days in Hyderabad, among Indian gaming stalwarts who will be driving the growth of the Indian gaming industry that is expected to reach USD830 million by 2012 growing at a CAGR of 53%, (according to the NASSCOM report). Stay tuned for more from the NAGFO Gaming and Animation Summit.

And as last year we will be at Tech-Ed this year once again, fully packed with lots of ideas and technical equipment like our wonderful HD cam, laptops, netbooks and more. And that's all for you guys out there how can't either join the show or who are at Tech-Ed but can't attend all sessions, though.

So we will meet interesting people like Steve Teixeira and talk with them about their sessions and why they are at Tech-Ed 2009. Or we'll have a closer look at all the compelling Intel tech demos which will be shown at the conference's showcase.

And of course we will blog about all the interesting things which will be part of the Microsoft event during 9 to 13 November at fair trade center Berlin. So stay tuned and watch this space for all upcoming news, information, videoclips and more.

Dear Colleagues,

As a member of the Informatics Education Europe Organizing Committee it is a pleasure for me to inform you of the IEE IV 2009 conference which will take place on November 5-6 in Freiburg, Germany.

Informatics Education Europe IV is the fourth in a series of conferences promoted by ACM to provide a forum for European Informatics academics to discuss the latest developments in the teaching and learning of Informatics in Europe. The conference is not exclusive, experts in any area within the spectrum of Informatics are welcome and, while the focus is on Europe, academics from elsewhere in the world are also invited to participate.

We have set up a very interesting programme ranging from topics like "Teaching programming" to "International cooperation" and we are also proud to announce our invited speakers: Hans-Ulrich Heiss from the TU Berlin with his talk about "Accreditation of Informatics Degree Programs in Europe: Straitjacket or Cloak?" and Mark Guzdial from Georgia Institute of Technology with his talk "Meeting Everyone's Need for Computing".

Further information on the conference can be found at the website.

I welcome you to forward this information to all your colleagues who might be interested in the conference.

regards
Christoph Hermann

University of Freiburg