Now I know why Dr. Dobb's columnist and concurrency expert Herb Sutter hasn't turned in his column -- he's been preparing for his upcoming Effective Concurrency seminar on March 16-18, 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Among the topics he will be covering are:

• Fundamentals.
  • Define basic concurrency goals and requirements
  • Understand applications' scalability needs
  • Key concurrency patterns

• Isolation: Keep work separate
  • Running tasks in isolation and communicate via async messages
  • Integrating multiple messaging systems, including GUIs and sockets
  • Building responsive applications using background workers
  • Threads vs. thread pools

• Scalability: Re-enable the Free Lunch:
  • When and how to use more cores
  • Exploiting parallelism in algorithms
  • Exploiting parallelism in data structures
  • Breaking the scalability barrier

• Consistency: Don't Corrupt Shared State:
  • The many pitfalls of locks--deadlock, convoys, etc.
  • Locking best practices
  • Reducing the need for locking shared data
  • Safe lock-free coding patterns
  • Avoiding the pitfalls of general lock-free coding
  • Races and race-related effects

• High Performance Concurrency
  • Machine architecture and concurrency
  • Costs of fundamental operations, including locks, context switches, and system calls
  • Memory and cache effects
  • Data structures that support and undermine concurrency
  • Enabling linear and superlinear scaling

• Migrating Existing Code Bases to Use Concurrency

• Near-Future Tools and Features

If you're in the neighborhood and concurrency is something in your future (and if you're a programmer, you can darn well bet it will be in your future), then try to attend this 3-day event. According to Herb, this will be his only European public seminar in 2009, so you won't want to miss it. And if you're there, please remind Herb to send me his column real soon now.