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

I thought it would be something valuable to share with you too.

The links actually cover tech, blogging and entrepreneur oriented events. Many of the events found at these sites are free or very low cost. All of them provide a great opportunity to meet people and learn a little about the subject at hand.

While attending one of these events myself I had a little epiphany: in the age of digitally connected everything - the face to face and handshake connection is still very very important ...and fun!

Here's the list:

• Silicon Florist (this is awesome)
• Calagator (this is awesome)
• Portland Web Innovators
• Portland Web Tech Events
• TIE Oregon
• Oregon Entrepreneur Network (OEN)
• Refresh Portland
• Hazelnut Tech Talk
• Beer and Blog
• Ignite Portland (ideas, inspiration not just tech!)

Oh - and I'll be attending the Portland Web Innovators event tomorrow.

12/3 | 4PM | 2405 Siebel Center for Computer Science

UPCRC Illinois Research Seminar: A Structured, Unified Approach to Multi-Core and Many-Core Computing - with Applications by Michael McCool, Intel & U of Waterloo

Still, CS continues to have ‘a bad rep’ or at least computer scientists continue to think of themselves as ‘second-class scientists’. Some in the field believe there will be no successful interactions with other colleagues and scientists until CS is positioned as as much of a science as others and this implies uniting the community and presenting a coherent interface to the rest of the world. Finally, as Wendy Hall’s closing remarks pointed, it also implies defining when a new discipline begins and when we are simply mixing together 1 or 2 disciplines to solve various aspects of a problem. If a multidisciplinary collaboration is to be fruitful, it has to be taken at the educational level and given a long-term commitment. Words widely repeated during the conference even when referring to multi-disciplinary research.

Whilst aware of the need to work collaboratively; many computer scientists are afraid that this will distil the importance and identity of their already misrepresented field. What do you believe will happen when mixing CS with other disciplines?

University of Pisa, Antonio Albano then went on to present his school’s experiment with a Graduate Program in Business Informatics. As a response to the Italy’s general decline in enrolments of students in Informatics in the late 90’s, Pisa University decided to tackle it with interdisciplinary graduate programs between the Informatics and Economics departments. The Programs turned out to be a huge success as it spurred not only a steady growth in enrolments of students within the school contrary to the general trend of withdrawals; but even attracted students from other universities. Student satisfaction was on average a rotund 3 over 4 and students turned out to be highly motivated. Finally, the job market welcomed them as 94% of the graduates found a job in an average of 1 month after graduation.

The following talk focused on Teaching Logic Programming for Interdisciplinary Computing. Since it allows users to think in more human-like statements than typical computer languages, logic programming has proved very useful both for Artificial Intelligence and interdisciplinary applications and shows impressive results among beginners thereby making interdisciplinary research around AI appealing to the non-computer specialist.

Whether bringing Academia and Industry closer together to stimulate research, or working with different disciplines to stimulate enrolments and better respond to the job market or making research more accessible to non-experts; multi-disciplinary approaches seem to be the only way forward.

This year, 80 of the leading CS faculties, department chairs research institutes in Europe gathered in a humid Paris for the European Computer Science conference to delve into the new role Informatics should play among the sciences. Put forward this year was the need for a multidisciplinary approach uniting research, curricula as well as education.

The several keynotes of this first day of conference addressed different aspects of the matter. While Mark Harris opened the conference with a keynote on ‘The Role of Informatics on Addressing the big Global Challenges”, he stressed the importance of an all-rounder, well trained IT specialist, able to take on a much-needed leadership role in the field. He pointed out to the need for multi-disciplinary training in order to produce graduates who are both generalists and specialists as the only answer to fill the leadership gap inherent to the field of ICT at the moment. The talk raised quite a few questions, particularly salient seemed to be the issue that a lot of faculty are either not aware of the multi-core ‘tsunami’ coming their way or don’t know how to tackle it.

After him, European Commission Head of strategy for ICT Research and Innovation, Khalil Rouhana, then presented the EU strategy for ICT research and innovation, explained the gaps of private & public sector investments in the EU compared to the US. Proportionally, companies invest much less in ICT R&D in EU member states compared to the US but more surprisingly the EU public sector invests even less (60% lower). He linked it to the fragmentation of markets present in the EU where a lack of a single European market for innovative ICT, a fragmented public demand as well as R&D investments explain in great part these shortcomings. Luckily, 3 new initiatives in private-public partnerships around the fields of energy efficient buildings, energy efficient factories and green cars have recently been put in place by the EU to remedy this.

Wendy Hall- ACM President- closed the keynotes in beauty with an expose of her study of the Web and its evolution. One of her conclusions highlights nicely the central issue of the conference; computer science is a relatively new discipline which is still working through some of its issues and trying to come to terms with its identity; while it had a huge impact on society, it is still taught in a very boring or limited way in schools, underestimated by public spending and in dire need of leadership. But these challenges are also loaded with opportunities such as parallelism, multi-disciplinary approaches, etc...will they be taken advantage of?

In today's keynote, it's expected that Renee will give us more information on the Intel Atom Developer Program, which Paul Otellini announced yesterday in his keynote. Unfortunately, there's no live video stream of the keynote, but it will be made available online 24 hours after it occurs (I've updated yesterday's liveblog post to include a link to video of Paul's keynote).

Today, I'll be using the same tools I used yesterday to track what people are saying at IDF. Mostly, I'll be relying on the tweets of our team on the ground in San Francisco - here's a search that should catch most of what they're saying in real time.

At the beginning of her keynote, Renee gave a nice plug for Intel Software Network, inviting developers to come here for what they need to know, including info on Intel's tools for high performance parallel programming, like Intel Parallel Studio. Now the VP of Marketing at Cakewalk is on stage - "Our rock stars really *are* rock stars." :-) They were able to render 140 tracks in real time on a single system!

Now Renee's talking about some recent acquisitions - Rapidmind and Cilk Arts, and how these technologies will be integrated into future tools. We also acquired Wind River - did you know there are more than 1 billion devices deployed with a Wind River OS?

Now she's talking about the Intel Media SDK, available now. This is a toolkit that allows you to accelerate video in your application, whether it's a game or a movie editing app. Also, Intel has shown off the first public demo of Larrabee (a real time ray tracing demo). That's big news, and very exciting. A film grain effect that takes 129 lines of code on a traditional GPU takes only 25 lines of code on Larrabee.

Dreamworks Animation takes the stage to talk about "Shrek's Law" - compute power requirements double with every generation of Shrek. Their next film is all about dragons - showing a never before seen demo video of thousands of dragons on screen, with 4000 controls to manage performance and behavior. As you can imagine, this is a steep compute load. The movie's called How To Train Your Dragon, and the release date is March 25, 2010.

Now on to small form factor devices - netbooks and handhelds. There are 17 OSVs distributing Moblin. Running a video from Novell telling their story. And Mark Shuttleworth (Canonical) and Dell are here to talk about the new Dell Ubuntu Moblin netbook. The Dell Mini 10v will be available starting tomorrow at Dell.com, and sports "blindingly fast suspend and resume time" according to Mark Shuttleworth. Can't wait to check that one out.

Now Renee moves to the topic of the new Intel Atom Developer Program, with the question "how to make money?" Dell is a strong supporter of the Intel Atom Developer Program. Microsoft is announcing Silverlight for Moblin - the beauty of runtimes is that you write your application once, and it runs on multiple platforms that support the runtime. And the Adobe AIR runtime will also support Moblin and the Intel Atom Developer Program. On stage now is Peter Biddle (@PeterNBiddle on Twitter) describing how to "innovate and make money with the Intel Atom Developer Program". In addition to just apps, the program will also allow developers to write and sell components, which other developers can incorporate into their apps. Make money selling apps, components, or both. And all of the community resources at Intel Software Network will be behind the program, including the Black Belt recognition program. Speaking of Black Belts, developer Gaston Hillar, one of our Black Belts, is on stage demoing his application running on Windows and Moblin at the same time (on two machines, of course :-). Gaston offers advice for developers: make small changes to existing code, and target the netbook market, which is growing fast.

Renee closes with an invitation to come join Intel Software Network - read our blogs, post questions and answers in our forums, watch our videos, and get to know our community. Software is about developers, which means it's about you, and Intel Software Network loves developers. So come join us! :-)

I think that's it for Renee's keynote. There's a ton of information available out there, including a new "social media release" from our very own Amy Barton and Maryann Iannitti, which contains all the latest detailed information on the Intel Atom Developer Program, how you can get involved, and maybe even win a VIP trip to CES 2010 in Las Vegas. Check it out, and join the program!

The video of Renee's keynote should be available in 24 hours, so I'll update this post with a link when it's available. You can find video of all the IDF 2009 keynotes, and a lot more, on this page. Thanks for joining my liveblog again, and feel free to drop any thoughts or questions you have in the comments below! :-)

First of all, a few of our team members are in the keynote room right now, waiting for our CEO Paul Otellini's keynote, livetweeting interesting stuff. There one announcement he's going to make that has special relevance to our team. :-) Make sure you're paying attention to @billpearson, @intelsoftware, @amybarton, and @mungara on Twitter. Oh, and I'll be retweeting cool stuff as @jabancroft, too.

Here's a link to a Twitter search I'm using to watch real time chatter about IDF - intel OR idf OR idf09. That stream moves pretty quickly, but the interesting stuff should bubble up.

I'll update this post as the keynotes progress, with links to news and more information. Stay tuned, developers! :-)

First up, Paul Otellini takes the stage, and talks about the continuum of personal computing - the spectrum of devices that we all use. Mentions the importance of online community, social networks (yes, even Twitter :-). And the "cameras go wild" as Paul holds up working 22nm silicon.

Software is what binds the continuum together, and software is changing. Today it's all about multiple clients and multiple clouds. Intel is the 3rd largest ISV community in the world, with 136,000 students and 2,000 professors trained on parallel programming. There are over 14 million developers on Intel platforms in the world.

Steve "Chippy" Paine is also doing some liveblogging of the keynotes, with photos, over at MidMoves.com. As is Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins over at Silicon Angle.

Here's another Twitter search that's a little more focused: updates from the folks on our team (and a few others) who are tweeting from the keynotes. That other general IDF search feed is generating WAY too much flow for even me to keep up with. :-)

Now Paul's talking about the software environment for Atom. It's complex. How can we make it more unique? Paul says the key value proposition is "port of choice". Netbooks are taking off. And so, we introduce the Intel Atom Developer Program (this is the big announcement our team has been waiting for! :-). A common runtime is key. Adobe and Microsoft have announced support, for Moblin and Windows runtime environments. The Intel Atom Developer Program will allow developers to create and sell apps for netbooks. Developers can join the program at http://appdeveloper.intel.com. Paul is showing off a video announcing support from Dell, Acer, and Asus. Our very own Ajay Mungara will be the community manager for the new program.

Now Paul's talking about Atom-based auto infotainment, with BMW and Mercedes already on board. And he's showing off the Moblin 2.1 user interface on a Moorestown-based MID. Moblin 2.1 will include shortcuts to your social media apps and contacts. I can't wait to check it out, and neither can Bob Duffy and Josh Hilliker. :-)

Looks like that's it for Paul Oteilini's keynote this morning. There will be lots more info for developers tomorrow in Renee James' keynote, and I'll do the liveblogging thing again to cover all the news. Thanks for reading, and if you feel like it, drop a comment below and let me know if you found this useful/interesting! :-)

Update: Looks like the video of Paul's keynote is now available at the Intel Press Room site. Check it out for yourself, and see how well I did (or didn't!) with my liveblogging. :-)

Renee James, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s Software and Services Group, will discuss  developing for the continuum of Intel platforms.  Renee will be joined on stage by some key industry partners and will provide updates on Intel developer programs and software for Intel platforms.

If you want to be one of the first to get the inside scoop on the news in Renee's keynote, visit newlegendswanted.com.

If you can't make it in-person to see us at the show - don't worry - we've got you covered.  Stay in touch at our official IDF website or on Facebook to watch the keynotes and read all the exciting news as it happens.  As a bonus, be among the FIRST to find out about our special IDF announcement for developers by signing up with your email address at http://www.newlegendswanted.com. 

I hope to see you all at the show!