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.
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Using Intel Parallel Studio to teach the most difficult issues related to multi-core programming

Posted on Intel Software Network
When I finished installing Intel Parallel Studio and I saw the new toolbars integrated in Visual Studio 2008, I couldn’t help beginning to read the complete documentation for this exciting product.
I really liked the capabilities offered by Intel Parallel Studio. It helped me to work faster in order to parallelize existing serial code. It also helped me to find the most difficult bugs and to profile my applications. I do believe it is a unique tool. You’ll find a lot of information about Intel Parallel Studio on its main Website: http://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-parallel-studio-home/
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Work Stealing Queues in .Net 4 and in Previous Versions

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
.Net 4.0 Beta 1 offers a new and improved thread pool engine. It uses work stealing queues to provide nice load-balancing capabilities, better performance and greater scalability. The work stealing mechanism allows you to reduce the scheduling overhead in highly parallelized algorithms.
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Invoking parallel tasks

Posted on Intel Software Network
In a recent post, Robert Chesebrough (Intel) talked about less focus on threads and more focus on tasks. I agree with him. I do believe that decomposing the job to be done into many tasks is the key to a successfully parallelized algorithm.

Running a parallelized C# threaded application using different number of cores in Windows Vista

This video shows the difference between using one core and four cores in a highly threaded, parallelized application programmed in Visual C# 3.0 (2008). Many people say multicore CPUs are useless. Watching this video you will find out that there is a lot of power in multicore CPUs. Developers must tackle the multicore revolution to exploit multicore CPUs in new applications.



The application uses the excellent AForge.Net C# imaging library. For more information about it, visit: www.aforgenet.com
The application shown in the video is developed and explained in Chapter 12: Developing a Completely Parallelized Application.
This is the chapter's table of contents:

Joining many different parallelized pieces into a complete application
Time for action – Creating an opacity effect in an independent thread
Running code out of the UI thread
Time for action – Creating a safe method to change the opacity
Blocking the UI—Forbidden with multithreading code
Time for action – Creating a class to run a task in an independent thread
Time for action – Putting the logic into methods to simplify running tasks
in a pool of threads
Time for action – Queuing requests, running threads, and updating the UI
Combining threads with a pool of threads and the UI thread
Time for action – Creating a specialized parallel algorithm piece subclass
to run concurrently with the pool of threads
Time for action – Creating a specialized parallel algorithm coordination
subclass to run concurrently with the pool of threads
Time for action – Overriding methods in the brightness adjustment
coordination subclass
Time for action – Starting new threads in a new window
Creating threads inside other threads
Time for action – Showing new windows without blocking the user
interface
Multiple windows and one UI thread for all of them
Rationalizing multithreaded code
Summary

For more information visit: http://www.packtpub.com/beginners-guide-for-C-sharp-2008-and-2005-threaded-programming/book