Dryad: Program thousands of machines without knowing anything about parallel programming

The guys at Microsoft Research are doing some interesting things with parallel programming. It’s not an area I’ve ever had anything to do with, but one can see how the combination of Windows Azure and Dryad offer the novice parallel programmer access to a massive amount of compute power.

Imagine the kind of power you can wield when you really know little-to-nothing about parallel programming. I can imagine a technology like this is something we might play about with, but the chance we’d ever get to try it out on thousands of computers would be slim. However, imagine running a thousand instances for an hour on Windows Azure. Quite interesting to see what you could achieve – from zero-knowledge to hero in 59 minutes?

There is a talk here from 2007 which explains the ideas behind Dryad. If you’ve ever felt like being involved in parallel programming, don’t do anything until you’ve watched the video and visited the MS Research site.

They even have an academic download of something called DryadLINQ.

Dryad: Program thousand sof machines without knowing anything about parallel programming.

Planky – GBR-257