Codeguru Update eNewsletter - November 4th, 2008

Also historic for this week is an upgrade to the discussion forum on Codeguru. If all goes as planned, the discussion forum software will be upgraded on Wednesday evening. There won't be any major changes that you'll notice; however, the software will have better security and will allow us to use a few AJAX features.

In this newsletter, I post hot threads that are happening in the discussion forum on Codeguru. One hot thread this week is on multi-core processors. This is an area I've been focused on for a couple of years now due to the impact these processors will make. It is interesting to see some of the misunderstandings around multi-core systems.

In the hot thread on the site, such a misunderstanding started the conversation. That misunderstanding centered on the issue of a computer only using half its power to run a program. It wasn't using the full power. This was a direct result of a program running on just a single core of a dual-core program. The result is that the one core was fully utilized, but the other was not. This resulted in 100% use of the core, but only 50% usage of the entire processor. As noted in the thread, if this were a quad-core system, only 25% of the processor's power would have been used.

As a developer, you have to be aware of the impact of multi-cores on your programs. There is a paradigm shift you need to be aware of when architecting your programs. Microsoft, Intel, and others have tools to make coding your applications to multi-core systems easier, but it is still up to you to determine what parts of an application can be architected to run concurrently or in parallel. A processor's logic or API will not be able to figure that out on its own.

In many cases, threading has been used in the past to break an application into pieces so it could run concurrently or in parallel. It is interesting to note that with the tools that are coming, you should not be thinking in terms of threads, but rather in terms of tasks. You will want to architect your programs with tasks in mind. A task would be a piece of logic that can run at the same time as others. Thus, you can identify a task that can be parallelized or run concurrently. Then, you also can identify contingencies that these tasks might have.

Bottom line, multi-core processors are changing the way we architect many of our applications. Today, you need to consciously think about what the impacts are and plan them into your applications. The tools are already getting better at making this easier, but there is still a ways to go before thinking about multi-core falls to the wayside in the same way that thinking about memory did in the early 90s.

We are at a point where a historic change in how programs are architected is about to happen. Parallelism and concurrency are part of the new frontier. That future looks bright for gaining power in our applications. Let's hope the historic changes happening in America with the election today also lead to a bright future!

Until next week...

Brad!
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Bradley L. Jones

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