CUDA lets you work with familiar programming concepts while developing software that can run on a GP This is the first of a series of articles to introduce you to the power of CUDA -- through working code -- and to the thought process to help you map applications onto multi-threaded hardware (such as GPUs) to get big performance increases. Of course, not all problems can be mapped efficiently onto multi-threaded hardware, so part of my thought process will be to distinguish what will and what won't work, plus provide a common-sense idea of what might work "well-enough". "CUDA programming" and "GPGPU programming" are not the same (although CUDA runs on GPUs). CUDA permits working with familiar programming concepts while developing software that can run on a GPU. It also avoids the performance overhead of graphics layer APIs by compiling your software directly to the hardware (GPU assembly language, for instance), thereby providing great performance.
The Little Book of Semaphores is a free (in both senses of the word) textbook that introduces the principles of synchronization for concurrent programming. In most computer science curricula, synchronization is a module in an Operating Systems class. OS textbooks present a standard set of problems with a standard set of solutions, but most students don't get a good understanding of the material or the ability to solve similar problems. The approach of this book is to identify patterns that are useful for a variety of synchronization problems and then show how they can be assembled into solutions. After each problem, the book offers a hint before showing a solution, giving students a better chance of discovering solutions on their own. The book covers the classical problems, including "Readers-writers," "Producer-consumer", and "Dining Philosophers." In addition, it collects a number of not-so-classical problems
JoCaml is Objective Caml plus (&) the join calculus, that is, OCaml extended for concurrent and distributed programming. The new JoCaml is a re-implementation of the now unmaintained JoCaml by Fabrice Le Fessant. With respect to this previous implementation, main changes are: * Numerous syntax changes, we believe the new syntax to be cleaner. * Disparition of mobility features, sacrified for the sake of OCaml compatibility. * Much better compatibility with Objective Caml. o Source compatibility is about 99%, there are three new keywords (def, reply and spawn) ; or and & should definitely not be used as boolean operators. o Binary compatibility for matching versions.
Parallel4 is a easy-to-use multi-threading API for Java an other JVM based languages like Groovy. It offers parallel versions of the "for" and "foreach" loops to leverage the full power of todays multi-core CPUs.
Parallel4's goals are:
* Simple API: Hide as many details of multi-threaded programming as possible from the API. Although it does not offer transparent/implicit multi-threading in a strict sense, it tries to come as close to this as a non-functional programming language allows.
* Familiar API: Offer well known constructs, e.g. the "for" loop and add parallelism to it.
* Easy adaptation of parallel programming: Based on a familiar API, it is easy to introduce multi-threading. Often, two additional lines of code are enough without imposing any structural changes.
* Adaptive: Let the "framework" make reasonable defaults to adapt to the execution environment, e.g. use as many threads as CPU cores are available.
* Performance: A low overhead makes it easy to decide whether to use parallel processing or not.
* Reliable: Multi-threading gets tricky when things go wrong unexpectedly. A well defined exception handling makes this a bit easier.
The process of writing large parallel programs is complicated by the need to specify both the parallel behaviour of the program and the algorithm that is to be used to compute its result.
In an earlier post Over on the Twisted blog, Duncan McGreggor has asked us to expand a bit on where we think Twisted may be lacking in it’s support for concurrency. I’m afraid this has turned into a meandering essay, since I needed to reference so muc