Introduction

Hi,

My name is Hazim Shafi and I'm an Architect in the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft.  My primary reponsibility is parallel performance analysis tools.  I received a BSEE from Santa Clara and MS and PhD degrees from Rice University.  For the past 15 years, I've been primarily working on various aspects of parallel and distributed processing.  Most of my experience has been in efforts to improve the performance of shared-memory multiprocessor systems, primarily through techniques to reduce or tolerate memory latency (think of memory/cache hierarchy design, cache coherence, and cooperative hardware/software techniques in this area).  In the process, I gained a lot of experience in building parallel performance analysis tools and general performance tuning techniques for parallel applications.  Before joining Microsoft, I was a Research Staff Member at IBM Research where I worked on the Sony Playstation 3 (Cell Architecture), the design and performance evaluation of a petaflop high performance computing system (DARPA HPCS program), and power aware computing.

I'm thrilled to be participating in the upcoming PDC2008 conference later this month (https://www.microsoftpdc.com), where I will be showing off some really cool technology.  My session is on Monday 10/27 at 1:45pm and is titled "Microsoft Visual Studio: Bringing out the Best in Multicore Systems".  Stay tuned here after the conference starts for an exchange about what's coming.  In the meantime, you can see a preview of some of the cool tools that we'll demo at PDC in our article "Improved Support For Parallelism In The Next Version Of Visual Studio" in the October issue of MSDN Magazine. 

I hope that this blog will be a good forum to get to know our customers, understand their needs, and hopefully help them be more successful.