About code. Mostly on C++
A recent question on stackoverflow raised the problem of a fast algorithm to count the unique colors in an image (Faster algorithm to check the colors in a image). My answer what that this kind of problems are suited for parallelization. However, parallelization may only help when used judiciously. To demonstrate the point I have … Read more
Microsoft has recently announced at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit the introduction of a new technology called C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism or shortly C++ AMP that helps C++ developers use the GPU for parallel programming. The new technology will be part of Visual C++, integrated with full support (edit, build, debug, profile) in the next … Read more
Channel9 recently posted a video with the Parallel Computing Concurrency Runtime team talking, mainly, about tasks and continuations, new features to the Parallel Patterns Library. These are already available through the ConcRT Extra’s Sample Pack. You can watch the half hour interview with the team here. Besides the new stuff they shown, I particularly liked … Read more
At the beginning of this year I have posted a short questionnaire on concurrency on my blog. I have promised to publish the results, so here they are. The number of respondents was 27 (and not everybody answered all the questions). Q: What is your role in application development? Q: How many cores has your … Read more
I think application development faces two challenges nowadays: 64-bit and multi-core/many-core hardware. Switching from 32 to 64 bit is just another step in the evolution of processors. There was a time when we switched from 8 to 16, and then from 16 to 32. There are problems that arise every time, but probably in 10-20 … Read more
Last week Microsoft published on DevLabs a .NET language for building parallel applications, called Axum, and earlier known as Maestro. This new language is build on the architecture of the web, on the principles of isolation, message-passing, fault-tolerance, loose-coupling. It is said to have a more succinct syntax than Erlang, and have the isolation advantage … Read more
The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by the John Horton Conway in 1970. It is the best-known example of a cellular automaton. It consists of a collection of cells which, based on a few mathematical rules, can live, die or multiply. Depending on the initial conditions, the cells form various patterns throughout … Read more
In this post I’ll show some F# constructs, all put together in a simple application that modifies file names that match a criteria. This would be an application that is started from a console with the following command line options: filesmod.exe -f < folder > [-r] -p < pattern > [-pre < prefix >] [-suf … Read more