.NET Developer Journal: Grid Computing with F#

Chad Albrecht has written an article for the recent edition of .NET Developers Journal called F# on a Virtual Super Computer.  It uses the excellent Alchemi grid computing framework from my the University of Melbourne (a wonderful institution from my home country that also brought us Mercury, whose design and implementation of existential types strongly influenced my decision to choose a runtime-type passing design for C# and .NET generics, a fact we have really forgotten to mention over the years). 

But I digress.  Chad's article is an excellent guide to how to get going with Alchemi and F# -  I was really impressed with how easy it is to get code distributed and coordinated, and it makes a lot of other work on distribution look laboured. Here's how Chad describes the article.

For those of you interested in F# or grid computing, check out my article in the May issue of .NET Developers Journal . The article, starting on page 18, describes the process of grid enabling an application written in F#, a new meta programming language developed by Microsoft Research. Using an example of Pi calculation to the nth digit, the article demonstrates the parallel processing of an algorithm discovered by Fabrice Bellard . Alchemi , an open-source.NET framework, is used as the grid computing platform. Also discussed in the article are some of the differences between F# and C# as well as their corresponding reasons.

Enjoy!