Around 1500 geeks in Seattle for the MVP Summit 2009

Fri, February 27, 2009, 03:39 PM under Events
My last participation as an attendee was the MVP summit in 2005 and 4 years later I'll be participating again but this time from the other side (was planning to do it in 2007 but failed). There are many events to go to and I've narrowed it down to the following. If you read this blog and you are around, why not find me and buy me a beer? ;-)

Saturday ALT.NET Seattle 2009.

Sunday – WSCTC 4th floor (welcome, keynote, reception), and then
Sunday Jillian's for evening geek party.

Monday – Hanging out with Device MVPs: Lunch time + an evening reception, on Redmond campus.

Tuesday – presenting to C++ MVPs about parallel debugger, and then
Tuesday – presenting to Managed Languages MVPs about parallel debugger, and then
Tuesday – evening at the MVP Summit party.

Wednesday – probably at WSCTC (keynote, panel and general sessions + lunch).

Parallelism in Greek

Mon, February 23, 2009, 04:53 PM under Events | ParallelComputing
During my working_from_Greece stint over the Christmas and New Year's period, I squeezed in presenting at an event in Athens. Parts of the recorded presentation are now available on the Greek MSDN pages. Scroll down the page to choose between the 2 presentations


The 1st presentation was this one. The 2nd presentation was a (interactive) Greek version of the code-heavy Parallel Programming session.

Finally, for those of you physically living in Greece, there is a 2-page article/interview on parallel computing in February's PC Magazine.

Why Care About Parallelism aka The Inevitable Shift

Sun, February 15, 2009, 09:56 PM under ParallelComputing
That was the title of a 45-minute (inc. questions) presentation I gave last December. It was a basic introduction to the manycore shift including what is parallelism and why software developers should care. The session ended by touching at a very high level on what Microsoft is doing in this space.

It was slides only (well, there were 3 demo/sample apps shown but no code) and you can download the deck in a ZIP file (the slides are a montage from many other decks of other Microsoft employees).

The basic flow has as follows
slide 3: Understanding Moore's Law
slide 4-7: Moore's law is still alive, but is not translated to higher frequencies. That is mainly due to the power wall, which at the end of the day means more heat than the CPU manufacturers can deal with
slide 8: So instead the manycore shift enters with CPU manufacturers adding more cores to the die rather than making a single one go faster. Predictions are for 100-core machines within 5 years (for the record, these are not my predictions)
slide 9: For us software developers, to take advantage of the increased total horsepower of manycore machines (on the client/desktop) you must employ parallelism. No other magic bullet or automatic gain. It is naïve to think that we will not need the increased speed or that we don’t know what to do with it:
a. We have been taking advantage (implicitly or explicitly) of increased CPU speeds over our entire existence. Why do we think we'll stop now?
b. Every shift in the software industry (whether it is the move from console to GUI apps, or desktop to mobile apps or even the recent client side web programming advancements) has been partly possible due to being able to take advantage of higher processor speeds. Why will the next shift in computing (whatever that is) be different?
slide 10: DEMO the morphing application (same one I showed at Tech Ed EMEA)
slide 11: Important to note that not all of the additional cores will be as fast as today's CPUs – they will more likely be of lower frequency; so to get even the same output that we get from one core today, we'll have to use parallelism to leverage more than one cores.
slide 12: Also important to note that it isn’t just Microsoft telling this story. Virtually every industry player is predicting the same situation.
slide 13: So the question is: what do I do with all those cores? Besides the same goals that good multithreading has (responsiveness, scalability and latency-awareness) parallelism takes it to the next level.
slide 14 to 15: Obey Amdahl's Law: do the same thing, but genuinely faster
slide 16: Obey Gustafson's law: do more stuff in the same time!
slide 17: Use speculative execution.
slide 18: DEMO the RayTracer application (same one I showed at PDC)
slide 19: "OK, I am sold. I must use parallelism. Show me how"… "Well, actually it is darn hard today if you try and use traditional multithreading to achieve parallelism"
slide 20: Microsoft established the Parallel Computing Initiative to address the goals/symptoms above
slide 21: Not the only team in Microsoft thinking about this problem. Attacking it from many angles.
slide 22: DEMO Baby Names application
slide 23: I bet you want to see some code… Read the Summary slide, and let's move on to the next session.

Give a session on Parallel Programming (or just learn from it)

Thu, February 5, 2009, 02:15 PM under ParallelComputing
Last year gave the same session on Parallel Programming twice: at PDC2008 and Tech Ed EMEA 2008 (identical content). The fact that those sessions ended up on the #3 and #2 spots in the ranking order, speaks to the fact that people are really interested and accepting of this topic. It is also testament that the technology Microsoft is releasing with Visual Studio 2010 is very compelling. So I invite you here to take my content and reuse it in your local regions!

The recordings (and slides) of the two identical sessions are available so you can learn by watching them: links from here and here.

I have also captured the session content on this blog:

1. Briefly introduce the manycore shift and clarify the release vehicle for Parallel Extensions.
2. Run one of the samples that ship with Parallel Extensions to demonstrate the end user benefit (no code shown at this point).
3. Clarify the potential difference between parallelism and multi-threading.
4. DEMOnstrate Fine Grained Parallelism via the Task-based Programming model built on the new ThreadPool.
5. DEMOnstrate Debugging Parallel Applications.
6. DEMOnstrate Structured Parallelism via the static Parallel class, e.g. Imperative Data Parallelism.
7. DEMOnstrate Declarative Data Parallelism: PLINQ.

Many conferences/user groups are interested in technical sessions on Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 so use the links above to learn and share.