Meeting in Vancouver, Canada

Pictures from the meeting

Time and Place

Vancouver, Canada
co-located with the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering, May 16-24, 2009

The Westin Bayshore Hotel
1601 Bayshore Drive
Vancouver, BC V6G 2V4, Canada
same room as the "Second International Workshop on Multicore Software Engineering" (IWMSE)

Monday, May 18, 2009
6.00pm-7.30pm
(after IWMSE)

Agenda

  - Invited talks

 


The Design of a Task Parallel Library
Dr. Wolfram Schulte
Research Area Manager
Microsoft Research, USA
[download slides]

Abstract
The Task Parallel Library (TPL) is a library for .NET that makes it easy to take advantage of potential parallelism in a program. The library relies heavily on generics and delegate expressions to provide custom control structures expressing structured parallelism such as map-reduce in users programs. The library implementation is built around the notion of a task as a finite CPU-bound computation. To capture the ubiquitous apply-to-all pattern the library also introduces the novel concept of a replicable task. Tasks and replicable tasks are assigned to threads using work stealing techniques, but unlike traditional implementations based on the THE protocol, the library uses a novel data structure called a `duplicating queue'. A surprising feature of duplicating queues is that they have sequentially inconsistent behavior on architectures with weak memory models, but capture this non-determinism in a benign way by sometimes duplicating elements. TPL ships as part of the Microsoft Parallel Extensions for the .NET framework, forms the foundation of Parallel LINQ queries.

Bio
Wolfram Schulte is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond and the founding manager of that lab's Research in Software Engineering.

 


Scalability Wins!
Matthias Pruksch
sepp.med, Germany
[download slides]

Abstract
In the advent of multi-core processors, the additional requirement "scalability" has a tremendous impact on performance critical applications. This will be clearly demonstrated by performance data of a real world application.

Bio
Matthias Pruksch earned a Diploma in Physics from the University Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany) 1991. Since then he worked in several Start-Up companies on the software development for high performance cameras, medical products and was responsible for the quality assurance of a massively parallel data warehouse application. In 2006 he joined sepp.med as an expert for software development and quality assurance of performance critical applications in the medical domain.


  - Discussion

For questions or proposals for discussion topics please email Victor Pankratius