Parallel Developer Tools
Having been on the job for a few months now, I feel like the team and I are finally beginning to settle in. It's been a period of significant flux for the Parallel Developer Tools team that included a new leader and (largely) new team trying to adjust to one another, building a plan for the next release of Visual Studio, recruiting and hiring top talent for the team, physically moving to a new building on a different part of campus (and separate from most of the rest of VS), building and strengthening partnerships with teams internal and external Microsoft to drive the Parallel Computing Initiative forward, and, and, and...
I came across this InfoWorld article today regarding developer skills and parallel computing. I was amused the fact that the issues raised by Dan Reed in the article echoed a conversation I had with Dan just yesterday when I met him for the first time in his office (which happens to be just across the street from mine). It's a fact that developers largely really are not (yet) trained for parallel computing. What's more, those that are trained typically have their experience base in high performance computing (think massive amounts of data being crunched on clusters), which is a slightly different problem than that we're trying to deal with on the PCP team. Our focus in more squarely on leveraging the increasing parallel-capable hardware of a single node, typically a client PC running Windows, and dealing with the complexities of shared memory, making existing software more parallel-scalable, and how we'll design next-generation, inherently parallel software, and -- of course -- how to make parallelism second nature to current and future developers.
By the way, I should mention that I'm looking for the industry's best developers, testers, and program managers to assist us in this effort. Here are some of the current job openings on my team:
Lead Software Development Engineer