Darryl Gove's blog

Multi-threading webcast

A long while back I was asked to contribute a video that talked about parallelising applications. The final format is a webcast (audio and slides) rather than the expected video. This choice ended up being made to provide the clearest visuals of the slides, plus the smallest download.

I did get the opportunity to do the entire presentation on video - which was an interesting experience. I found it surprisingly hard to present to just a camera - I think the contrast with presenting to an audience is that you can look around the room and get feedback as to the appropriate level of energy to project. A video camera gives you no such feedback, and worse, there's no other place to look. Still I was quite pleased with the final video. The change to a webcast was made after this, so the audio from the video was carried over, and you still get to see about 3 seconds of the original film, but the rest has gone. I also ended up reworking quite a few of the slides - adding animation to clarify some of the topics.

The topics covered at a break-neck pace are, parallelising using Pthreads and OpenMP. Autoparallelisation by the compiler. Profiling parallel applications. Finally, detecting data races using the thread analyzer.

Posted at 02:25PM Nov 26, 2007 by Darryl Gove in Sun  |  Comments[1]

Book on OpenMP

Interesting new book on OpenMP available. I've worked with both Ruud and Gabriele. I regularly see Ruud when he makes his stateside trips, and Gabriele used to work in the same group as I do before she moved from Sun. I've recently had a number of entertaining conversations with Ruud comparing the writing and publishing processes that we've been working through.

Posted at 04:07PM Sep 28, 2007 by Darryl Gove in Sun  | 

Multi-threading resources on the developer portal

Found a page of links to useful resources about multi-threading on the developer portal.

Posted at 11:14AM Sep 28, 2007 by Darryl Gove in Sun  |