Native concurrency, tools, and TM

Stephen Toub - MSFT

October 13th, 20080 0

The Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft is working on much more than Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework…

A few weeks back, Charles from Channel 9 spoke with us about our efforts on supporting concurrency and parallelism in native code; the video of that conversation was released this week, and you can view it at https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/The-Concurrency-Runtime-Fine-Grained-Parallelism-for-C. Niklas Gustafsson, an architect on our team, was also recently on Intel’s Parallel Programming Talk podcast discussing the Concurrency Runtime; you can listen to that podcast at http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2008/10/07/parallel-programing-talk-microsoft-concurrency-runtime/.

Charles also spoke with our tools team, which for Visual Studio is focusing on dramatically improving the debugging and profiling experience for when writing parallel applications; you can view that video at https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Parallel-Computing-Platform-An-Integrated-Approach-to-Tooling/.

In other cool news, our team focused on implementing an experimental transactional memory system has just started up a blog (https://blogs.msdn.com/stmteam/):

“This blog is about transactional memory with entries written by the team at Microsoft that is implementing an experimental transactional memory system in .NET. While we work in the Developer Division’s Parallel Computing Platform product group, we are not working on a product release at this time. Instead we have been incubating, researching, and experimenting with transactional memory.

Our goal is to create a TM system that lives up to its promise. This work has lead us to what we think is some industry-leading work – but we have been so busy doing it that we haven’t had a chance to talk about it; share what we have found; and more importantly hear what the community thinks of this effort.

This blog is our first step to remedy that. Welcome to the Transactional Memory blog here at MSDN.”

The first post on the blog is quite interesting and is definitely worth a read.