Tag: parallel computing

Microsoft Axum for Windows 7

The evolution of computing is intimately connected with multi-core and many-core architectures, and Microsoft is little shy about jumping aboard. But not only is the Redmond company embracing the parallel computing wave with its own products, it is also making solutions available designed to enable developers to start building parallel applications. Microsoft Axum is an illustrative example in this regard. Put together in Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Platform, Axum is essentially a .Net Framework language set up to allow developers to tailor their apps to multi-core and many-core scenarios. Axum comes with support for the following operating systems: Windows 2000; Windows 7; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP.

“Axum makes use of several concepts to enable safe parallel programming: domains isolate state, which helps you avoid implicit dependencies in your code that can result in difficult-to-find concurrency bugs,” revealed S. Somasegar, senior vice president, Developer Division. “Agents are threads of control that process messages asynchronously to stay scalable and responsive. Axum employs a cooperative blocking model that utilizes latencies to do meaningful work; agents that wish to receive a message will block, allowing another agent to execute in its place.” Read More»

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Windows 7 Increased Performance

Microsoft is optimizing Windows 7 in order to increase performance, and, in this context, the dispatcher lock is one of the components that has got cut off . According to the Redmond company, fewer hardware locks are synonymous with boosted parallelism, namely a new level of efficiency when it comes down to taking advantage of modern processing architectures. This is valid for Windows Server 2008 R2, namely Windows 7 Server, and, naturally, also for the Windows 7 client, since the two operating systems share the same code base.

“With Windows 7, the dispatcher lock is replaced with several finer-grained synchronization techniques, thus effectively distributing resource contention. The main benefits for applications include increased system performance and more optimal use of available hardware resources,” Phil Pennington, Windows Server Technical Evangelism, revealed.

Evolving from Windows Vista, Windows 7 is embracing the many core CPU world, delivering the promise of enhanced performance through the advantage represented by parallel computing. However, in order for Win7 to be tailored to many core processors, the platform’s kernel had to be freed from past relics such as the dispatcher lock. Read More»

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