30 November, 2007

The parallelism of the future

Back in the old days, I was a lucky owner of a dual CPU computer. Back then it was usually just servers that featured and required such power. Since then, I've always been interested in performing multiple actions at the same time, utilizing the power available at hand. Today, dual-core CPU's is normal, we're seeing quad-core CPUs becoming available at a resonable pricing, and soon this will go beyond anything imagined a couple of years ago.

Along with this, a new challenge is presented to developers: How do we take advantage of the multi-core possibilities? Although we've been familiar with multithreading for a while, the possibility of running separate parts of code on its own core is something else.

Yesterday Microsoft released an early preview of ParallelFX - it's available over at MSDN. ParallelFX (Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework) runs on .NET Framework 3.5 and provides some cool features in
regards of concurrent programming.

Stay tuned for some more posts on this subject in the future...

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