Friday, October 9, 2009

Moblin v2.0 is Multicore Ready

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
Moblin v2.0 for Intel Atom Processor based netbooks is already available. Developers with Linux experience will find it easy to target this new attractive platform. However, many developers have many questions related to the multicore support offered this new operating system.
Read more here

Monday, October 5, 2009

Rich Services Cloud Applications Require Parallel Programming Skills

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
The interest on Rich Services Cloud Applications is growing fast. Users want responsive and immersive interactions from any locations. Nowadays, you cannot think about a business application without mobility in mind. However, you cannot avoid creating a rich user experience (UX) in mobile devices whilst accessing services on the cloud. If you want to offer a really nice experience, you'll have to use parallel programming skills everywhere.
Read more here

Downsizing Multicore Programming Skills to Take Advantage of Intel Atom

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
There is no doubt that Intel Atom is an attractive microprocessor. Netbooks, embedded systems, consumer electronic devices, and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) are using its different flavors. But can multicore programming skills be useful with these single-core CPUs?
Read more here

Process Monitor v2.7: A New Release to Watch Processes and Threads in Windows

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
Process Monitor is a very complete advanced monitoring tool that shows and logs real-time activity for the file system, the Registry, the running processes and their threads in Windows. Yesterday, the Windows Sysinternals team made the new version v2.7 of Process Monitor available for download.
Read more here

All CPU Meter: A Simple Windows Gadget to Monitor Cores

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
All CPU Meter is a very simple sidebar gadget available for Windows Vista and Windows 7. It allows developers and users to check the microprocessor's usage and it shows an independent graph for each available logical core (hardware thread).
Read more here

TMonitor: Understanding What Happens With Each Hardware Thread

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
TMonitor, a new tool developed by the CPUID team, offers the possibility to understand what's going on with each hardware thread (logical core) on some modern multicore microprocessors.
Read more here

Web Workers: A Draft Recommendation to Allow Parallelism in Scripts

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
Most modern Web pages run scripts. So far, there are many limitations to allow these scripts to take advantage of multicore microprocessors. However, Web Workers is a draft specification that defines an API to allow Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel.
Read more here

Balder: A Silverlight 3 Managed 3D Engine Optimized for Multicore

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
Silverlight 3 doesn't offer native support for loading and rendering 3D models. However, Balder, an open source project, offers a very complete managed 3D engine for Silverlight 3. It achieved the necessary frame rate taking advantage of Silverlight's threading capabilities.
Read more here

Parallel Loops Require In-Depth Concurrency Knowledge

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
The new Parallel Extensions offered by .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 present developers the opportunity to use the new parallel loops. Using them, it is easier to distribute tasks in many cores. However, you don't have to forget about concurrency issues.
Read more here

New Parallel Debugging Windows in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
Visual Studio 2010, still in Beta 1, offers two new debugging windows: Parallel Stacks and Parallel Tasks. Using them, it is easier to understand the new Parallel Extensions offered by .NET 4.
Read more here

Tasks Are Not Threads in .NET 4 Beta 1

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
.Net Framework 4.0 with its Parallel Extensions, still in Beta 1, will add the possibility to work with tasks. It is very important to understand that tasks aren't threads. Tasks run using threads. However, it doesn't mean they replace threads.
Read more here

Fan: A Portable Language is Bringing Actors to JavaScript

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
Fan, another new programming language developed in the multicore era, has recently launched its 1.0.45 release. It is a very active open source project with a very interesting approach to many modern concurrent programming challenges.
Read more here

Keeping Parallelism Balanced is a Must

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
It is very important to optimize applications for existing and forthcoming multicore microprocessors. However, a lack of balance in parallelism levels could lead to explosive parallelism with resulting slowdown rather than speedup.
Read more here