Parallel Computing - Concurrency, Programming, Processing, Multi-Core

The manycore shift presents an unprecedented business opportunity for developers to design new software experiences that take advantage of the performance power of manycore architectures. At the same time, parallel programming is complex, difficult and labor-intensive, for even the most skilled developers.

Microsoft’s goal is to simplify parallel programming by taking a holistic approach and providing solutions which span from local to distributed computing and from task concurrency to data parallelism. Microsoft plans to deliver a solution-stack consisting of OS resource management, a concurrency runtime, programming models, language extensions, libraries, and tools, which will make it simpler for both native and managed code developers to safely and productively build robust, scalable and responsive applications. This will also enable industry partners to complement Microsoft’s technologies in order to solve the complex problems associated with developing high-quality parallel software.

Microsoft’s goal is to increase productivity by encapsulating complexity, so developers can focus on solving business problems.

About Parallelism at Microsoft

A Q&A with S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division
“Microsoft’s goal is to make the benefits of building software on manycore architectures simple and accessible to the broad developer community.” Here S. Somasegar talks about the progress of Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Initiative and what to expect in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010.

Letter from Lynne Hill, General Manager, Parallel Computing Initiative
”The CTP of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 will allow both native and managed developers to evaluate new parallel APIs that simplify parallel programming.” Here Lynne discusses the new parallel features available in the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

Revised Taking Parallelism Mainstream: Parallel Technologies in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 leads the first wave of developer tools to simplify the mainstream transition to parallel software development. Learn about Microsoft’s approach to parallel computing and the parallel technologies available in Visual Studio 2010.

The Manycore Shift: Microsoft Parallel Computing Initiative Ushers Computing into the Next Era.
The computational power of manycore processors promises to change the way people will interact with computers. This paper describes how Microsoft and industry partners are working together to enable businesses, software and hardware vendors, and individuals to take advantage of the "manycore shift."

Downloads

Evaluate the Parallel APIs and tools in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2
The Beta includes .NET Framework libraries such as the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ), as well as the Parallel Pattern Library (PPL) and Concurrency Runtime for developing native applications with C++, and parallel profiling and debugging tools for both Tasks and Threads.

Support for the Beta of Visual Studio 2010 is provided on MSDN Forums, where the community of developers helps answer questions. Here are the Parallel Computing Forums.

Preliminary documentation:

Parallel Programming in the .NET Framework

Concurrency Runtime and Parallel Pattern Library (PPL) for C++

Walkthrough: Debugging a Parallel Application

Thread Execution Data Views

Featured Resources

Parallel Computing Session Videos at Microsoft's Professional Developer’s Conference

Videos

New Parallel Capabilities of the Visual Studio 2010 Profiler

Visual Studio 2010 (currently in beta) includes new Parallel Performance Analysis tools. The new Profiler is a must-have tool for Developers interested in designing new "many-core" parallel-computing applications.

Parallel Tasks – new Visual Studio 2010 debugger window

In the next version of .NET and C++ that ship with Visual Studio 2010, a new task-based programming model is introduced. In this short video you will learn about Parallel Tasks, a new debugger window that helps developers debug applications that use tasks. You will also get a glimpse at the task-specific features of the Parallel Stacks debugger window.

Parallel Stacks – new Visual Studio 2010 debugger window

As developers try to take advantage of more and more cores in their applications, ultimately more and more threads will execute their code at the same time. When debugging such applications, there is a need to visualize multiple call stacks of multiple threads in a single view. This scenario is supported in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 via a new debugger window that this short video explores: Parallel Stacks.

CHESS

CHESS is an automated tool from Microsoft Research for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules.

Maestro

Maestro is an incubation project, a domain-specific language for concurrent programming.

Software Transactional Memory

This video discusses Microsoft's incubation of Software Transactional Memory.

User Mode Scheduling in Windows 7

This video discusses user-mode scheduling in Windows 7.

10-4 Episode 6: Parallel Extensions

This video discusses Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework.

Parallel Computing in Native Code: New Trends and Old Friends

This video discusses Microsoft's technologies to enable native code developers to write parallel programs.

Microsoft Technology Blogs

Parallel Programming with .NET

What's New in Beta 2 for PLINQ
Included in the .NET 4 Framework Beta 2 is a more robust and faster version of PLINQ. Between... more
Thursday, Nov 5

What’s new in Beta 2 for the Task Parallel Library? (Part 3/3)
Related posts: What's new in Beta 2 for the Task Parallel Library? (1/3) What's new in Beta 2 for... more
Wednesday, Nov 4

Parallel Programming in Native Code

What’s new in Beta 2 for the Concurrency Runtime, Parallel Pattern Library and Asynchronous Agents Library
Last week Visual Studio 2010 Beta was released for download. Since Beta1, the team has been pretty b... more
Thursday, Oct 29

Resource Management in Concurrency Runtime – Part 2
In my previous blog post, I talked about key concepts of the Concurrency Runtime’s (ConcRT) resource... more
Tuesday, Jul 21

Axum Blog

Axum at PDC!
Going to PDC this year? We are too! Niklas Gustafsson, the Principal Architect on Axum (and s... More...
Friday, Oct 23

Erlang at Yahoo!
Jebu Ittiachen and Arun Suresh of Yahoo! have written an interesting article for Dr. Dobbs about a p... More...
Monday, Oct 19

Transactional Memory Dana Groff

Adopting STM.NET? The Runtime Checker is Your Friend!
(by Lingli Zhang) In the previous blog post, Sukhdeep explained the STM.NET contract system, and ho... More...
Friday, Sep 4

STM.NET Contracts aka Access Modifiers for Transactional Memory
(by Sukhdeep Sodhi) Now that we’ve released STM.NET into the wild some of you may want to go beyond... More...
Tuesday, Aug 18

Incubation Technology Blogs

Microsoft Team Blogs

Niklas Gustafsson

The Perils of Lock-Freeness & Getting Tasks onto the UI Thread
In my last post, I was looking for someone to tell me about a race condition in the cancel() code path, but to my embarrassment, Krishnan Varadarajan,... More...
Friday, Nov 6

Forums

Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework

F# & parallel performance
I was playing with "Samples for Parallel Programming with the .NET Framework 4 (http://code.msd... More...
Wednesday, Nov 4

Is this the correct forum for this HPC question?
I am trying to run some of the Microsoft HPC examples and my jobs sit in the Configuring state. I h... More...
Monday, Nov 2

Parallel Computing in C++ and Native

Bad results of parallel_for loop
Running this program on my Intel Core2 Duo E8400 3.00GHZ, I get the following results:Serial 26.9109... More...
Saturday, Nov 7

Relation between different task_group instances
I tried to run n tasks using n different task_group instances. Result: only two tasks are activated... More...
Sunday, Nov 1