Designed for Performance

Windows Server 2008 R2 represents the latest evolution of the Windows Server operating system and corresponding support for high-end hardware systems with large numbers of microprocessors. Windows Server 2008 R2 is the first release of Windows to scale beyond 64 Logical Processors (LP) on a single computer and has been tested on systems with 256 LP's. R2 features enhanced support of Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) computer architectures along with new User-Mode Scheduling (UMS) technology. UMS enables custom thread-level scheduling within your own application. For certain categories of computing scenarios, this avoids the overhead of thread kernel transitions and context switching. Why is this important for Application Developers? New commodity computer systems will soon be available that leverage many-core architectures. Application Developers will want to ensure that their applications perform well on this new generation of high-performance commodity systems. Developers will appreciate that the new C++ Concurrency Runtime along with the .NET Parallel Extensions encapsulate much “many-core” programming complexity while Visual Studio 2010 includes new tools for debugging and profiling parallel computing applications.

• Scale Your Applications to Many-Core with R2

  Concurrent programming is quickly becoming a requirement in order to write applications and libraries that will perform faster than their predecessors. This lab introduces R2 support for Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) and User-Mode Scheduling. This is followed by coding exercises using the C++ Concurrency Runtime featuring the Parallel Patterns Library and the Agents Library.

• The “Many-Core” Application Platform

  Windows Server 2008 R2 is the "many-core" platform. This video introduces R2 from a platform performance perspective with insight into new operating systems include Logical Processor Groups and User-Mode Scheduling. Developers will appreciate the integration of platform technologies with new tools including the C++ Concurrency Runtime. See all videos within this topical category: http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/R2PERF

• User-Mode Scheduling

  User Mode Scheduler provides a new model for high-performance applications to control the execution of threads by allowing applications to schedule, throttle and control the overhead due to blocking system calls. In other words, applications can switch user threads completely in user mode without going through the kernel thread scheduler.

• C++ Concurrency Runtime, Parallel Patterns Library

  The C++ Concurrency Runtime is new with Visual Studio 2010 and currently in beta. The runtime encapsulates and extends many new operating system features including NUMA resource locality and User-Mode-Scheduling.

• C++ Concurrency Runtime, Asynchronous Agents Library

  The Agents Library is a C++ template library that promotes an actor-based programming model and in-process message passing for fine-grained dataflow and pipelining tasks. The Agents Library builds upon the scheduling and resource management components of the Concurrency Runtime.

• Parallel Profiler

  The new Profiler is a must-have tool for Developers interested in designing new "many-core" parallel-computing applications. Join James as he illustrates the profiler, profiling-options, and concurrency visualization techniques.