Articles filed in category 'Parallel Programming'

When you make a method call on an object, typically you must block the client while the object executes the call, and control returns to the client only when the method completes execution and returns.However, there are quite a few cases where you want to call methods asynchronously?that is, you want control to return immediately to the client while the object executes the called method in the background, and then somehow let the client know when the method execution is ...completed. Such an execution mode is called asynchronous method invocation and the action is an asynchronous call. Asynchronous calls allow you to improve availability, increase throughput and performance, and make your applications more scalable.See More

Applications can be single threaded or multithreaded. A single-threaded application is one in which the processor executes threads in a sequence, i.e., a thread would be scheduled by the operating system only if the execution of the currently running thread is complete. This approach doesn’t provide much system throughput (a measure of the amount of work done in unit time).

F#, the latest member of the Visual Studio family of languages, offers some enticing advantages over C# and Visual Basic, stemming from its functional-object fusion nature.Originally a research language from Microsoft Research, F# has long been a “secret weapon” in the arsenal of .NET programmers for doing statistical- and mathematical-heavy coding. More recently, however, a growing number of developers have begun to see the inherent advantages implicit in writing functi...onal code, particularly in the areas of concurrency. The buzz has begun to approach interesting levels, particularly on the heels of an announcement last year from the head of the Microsoft Developer Division, Somasegar, that F# would be “productized” and fully supported by Microsoft as a whole, suddenly removing the stigma and licensing restrictions that surround research projects.See More

In Show #449 we spoke to Niklas Gustafsson and Josh Phillips about Axum, a new language developed specifically for parallelism.