Using VirtualBox 3.0 Virtualization Software to Measure Multicore Scalability – Go Parallel

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallelThe new Sun’s VirtualBox virtualization software release offers very interesting features to allow developers to measure multicore scalability. As these new features were not available in previous versions, it is very important to consider them when evaluating a virtualization solution in order to test parallel performance in different operating systems and hardware environments.
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Actors, Messages and Low Lock Contention for Java – Go Parallel

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
Using actors and messages, concurrency is easier to understand. However, most developers don’t want to learn a new programming language in order to use actors and messages. If you want to forget a bit about threads and locks, you can add nice actor support to an existing Java application using Jetlang.
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Challenges in Multi-Core Era – Part 3 | Techdoer Times

Previously, I compared the performance of today’s popular operating systems with respect to multi-core processors. In this final part to Challenges in Multi-Core Era, I’ll talk about the multi-core capabilities found in today’s programming languages and development tools.
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Work Stealing Queues in .Net 4 and in Previous Versions – Go Parallel

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
.Net 4.0 Beta 1 offers a new and improved thread pool engine. It uses work stealing queues to provide nice load-balancing capabilities, better performance and greater scalability. The work stealing mechanism allows you to reduce the scheduling overhead in highly parallelized algorithms.
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Challenges in Multi-Core Era – Part 1 | Techdoer Times

A few years ago, in 2005, Herb Sutter published an article in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, “The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software”. He talked about the need to start developing software considering concurrency to fully exploit continuing exponential microprocessors throughput gains.
Here we are in year 2009…
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Lightweight Concurrency: Threads are on a Diet – Go Parallel

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
Most modern programming languages are adding lightweight concurrency capabilities. Why is this happening? It is a response to the multicore revolution. You need more parallelism in your applications and you need it without adding a great overhead.
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Alternatives for Parallelizing Legacy Serial Code – Go Parallel

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
Applications developed using modern programming languages can become legacy code faster than expected. Multicore microprocessors have been found guilty of transforming outstanding serial code into legacy code in just a few years. However, there are many alternatives to translate multicore power into application performance making small changes to the legacy serial code.
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New Garbage Collectors Designed With Parallelism in Mind

Posted on http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel
On the one hand, Garbage Collectors simplify developers’ lives, but on the other hand, they can become the greatest enemies of a parallelized algorithm’s performance. Finally, Java 7 and .Net 4 are going to offer new Garbage Collectors really targeted for multicore microprocessors with large memories.
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Silverlight 3 Beta 1 Multi-core programming possibilities using C#

Posted on Intel Software Network
This post talks about the possibilities offered by Silverlight 3 Beta 1 to create RIAs that take advantage of multi-core microprocessors.
Luckily, these possibilities are explained in “C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming: Beginner’s Guide“

Debugging Multithreaded Applications as Singlethreaded in C#

Posted on Packt Publishing Article Network
In order to solve problems that arise in concurrently running threads in applications, we need new debugging techniques suitable for the new parallelism environments that occur in Visual C#. In this article, you will learn many tricks and debugging procedures that will help you find solutions to multithreaded application problems and have a better understanding of the execution of parallel threads.
In this article, you will be performing the following exercises:
* Find out how to freeze some threads to stop concurrency and simplify the process for debugging one thread at a time.
* Learn to set and control breakpoints with multithreaded applications.
* Discover how to inspect values when multiple threads are accessing the variables that hold them .
* Develop multithreaded applications that show partial results to help us in the debugging process.