"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Saturday, December 13, 2008

Multi Core Programming

The presentation and discussion at pdxfunc this week was all about bytecodes, JITs, and performance of dynamic languages, in particular Javascript, in particular for Mozilla. Igal took good notes. The presenter, Jim Blandy of Mozilla, made a few corrections to the notes.

Jim's presentation was well done. Future meetings of pdxfunc may very well be video recorded. Too bad this was not... people with various levels of experience with compiler internals each expressed satisfaction.

Michael Lucas-Smith was at pdxfunc and arranged for an Industry Misinterpretations podcast with Jim. James Robertson has that up on his blog now. (Aside: MLS is a whirlwind of facts on sci-fi, astro-physics, and other brainy (literally) topics... if you ever have a chance to sit down with him at a pub.)

One of the interesting highlights of the discussion during Jim's presentation was a brief segue into language compiler and runtime characteristics that do or do not play well with modern CPU architectures, especially regarding caching and off-chip accesses. This led to a brief touch on upcoming many-core chips, and MLS mentioned Intel's Larrabee chip, which will have many cores, each essentially a simple, small-but-64-bit, Pentium plus vector processor.

Programming languages and implementations that support small, dynamic, shared-nothing (or at least shared-little), asynchronous processes stand a chance.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am researching about multi-core programming. I work with C# and C++. I am leaving C++ and focusing on C#. However, I do not know how to exploit multi-core processors.

Today, I've seen a new book about multicore programming with C# 2005 and 2008, by Packt Publishing. I think I'll get some answers buying it and reading. As it is the first book I found to talk specifically about multi-core exploit with C#, I think it can be a good tool for many non-experienced programmers. It is announced in http://www.packtpub.com/beginners-guide-for-C-sharp-2008-and-2005-threaded-programming/book

Anonymous said...

Anonymous, you should buy that book. It's been very useful for me.

You should also read Joe Duffy's "Concurrent programming on Windows". It will also help in your research.

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.