Concurrency Counts

It's been a year and a half since Herb Sutter published his prescient essay "A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" in Dr. Dobb's--and nothing's slowed down at all.

Just the opposite, in fact. By whatever technology it goes by--multi-threading, multi-core, parallel processing, or whatever--concurrency has gained momentum and is becoming the norm in software development. Why just this week alone, I've posted on Dr. Dobb's Portal articles such as:

• " Development and Optimization Techniques for Multicore Processors".
• "Dual-Core CPU Buyer's Guide".
• "Leveraging Multi-core Processors with Graphical System Design Tools".
• "Multicore Solutions Proliferating".

Then there are articles in recent issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal such as:

• "Inside the VSIPL++ API".
• "Multithreading, Java, & OSGi".
• "Threading & .NET".

And all that just for starters.

My point here is not just to impress you with the extent of currency coverage in Dr. Dobb's (well okay, in part it is), but to underscore that a grasp and understanding of concurrency is now fundamental to software development. Criminy, today's news is that even Apple has moved its entire iMac family to Intel Core 2 Duo processors.

If you're looking for even more info on multi-core based software development, another good place to start is with some presentations that PARC (formerly "Xerox PARC") put together earlier this year as part of the PARC Forum Series and has since made available in video and audio formats. The presentations include:

• Herb Sutter speaking on "Software and the Concurrency Revolution".
• Marc Tremblay, Sun Fellow, Vice President, and Chief Architect, Sun's Scalable Systems Group on "High Performance Throughput Computing".
• John Crawford, Intel Fellow, examining "The New Paradigm of Multicore Processors: Changing the Focus from Frequency to Instructions per Clock".
• Kunle Olukotun of Stanford University discussing " Architecture Support for Parallel Programming".

There's a trove of other audio/vidoe presentations in the PARC archives, ranging from AI to Nanotechnology. But the Multicore Computer Forum Series in particular is a gem and worth spending some time with.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:42 AM  Permalink