PDC Day 3

I did my first talk Wednesday, "A Deep Dive Into the Concurrency Runtime," where I talked about how to extend the PPL and Agents native libraries and how to build your own scheduler with our runtime. A rather dry topic, I almost managed to bore myself. However, the room was filled to capacity and more, and it seemed to go over well. Lots of good deep questions followed.

"Ask the Experts" was the evening event where we met with customers over dinner (chili dogs and beer) and discussed hard problems related to concurrency. It was really a treat to meet so many customers directly and help them think through how and if they could leverage parallelism in their apps. Not every app should, and there were definitely some instances where I had to just say "stick with what you're already doing."

Many have commented on our agents and messaging APIs for C++ and been really excited about getting these capabilities so easily. It's hard to imagine it being a good experience if it weren't for C++ lambdas being added, so that's really the pivotal new feature.

Today is the last day, and we have a panel on "The Future of Parallel Programming" at noon. I'll be talking about avoiding shared state with agents-based programming and an incubation project we have going on at this time, 'Maestro." It is a language for programming agents, partitioning state and leveraging data-flow for concurrency driven by asynchronous operations. More about that later.

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2008
  Gotta luv it as many of the customer think of it as a challenge and try to stump the expert.  :o)