Architect's Point-of-View (POV) - a look at the .NET Parallel Extensions (ParallelFX)
I just posted a screencast on Channel 9 about the new Parallel extensions CTP for the .NET framework. In my humble opinion, this is one of the most exciting new developments in the world of software development - where Moore's law has been hammering us with rapid hardware advances - while the software slowly catches up. In this day and age, dual and quad core processors are becoming the norm on servers, desktops, and notebooks - and until now, we have struggled with how to take advantage of this new processing power.
An Architectural POV (Point-of-View) is a short (10-15 minute) video covering a technical topic from the Architect's point of view. An arcPOV takes the Time-Scope-Resource balance into consideration and discusses the topic within one or more phases of a project. The objective of a POV is to state a position and solicit opinions/feedback from the community on the position taken and its validity.
In this POV I talk about how easy it is to now incorporate multi-core processing into your applications using the ParallelFX extensions with very little code - that can yield some pretty impressive performance improvements on dual and quad core systems...Take a look at these results below for a running an ISBN For-Next loop to iterate over various samples sizes (10k, 100k, 1mm) on dual and quad core processors using sequential and parallel processing - how's that for doing more with less!
Here's the link where you can download the December 2007 CTP - take a look - compare your results - and let us know what you think!
Technorati Tags: Architecture, ParallelFX, Architect POV
Comments
Anonymous
January 22, 2008
Great screencast. I was not aware of this capability! -bobAnonymous
February 08, 2008
Jeff - Excellent overview. Easy-to-understand explanation. Good demos. And very cool technology.Anonymous
February 08, 2008
Back in the day, did you ever try to write a multi-threaded application? Simple ones aren't too difficult