Also, Kim Greenlee of Digipede networks has recently spoken to our user group about Concurrent Software Development. Her presentation comprised of two parts; a. best practices in concurrent development and b. grid computing 101. Kim explained that In order to distribute a task to grid, we should be able to decompose it into executable segments which can be distributed on the grid. However, the distribution should be justified for instance ‘task A’ maxes out CPU on the machine, it would not be beneficial to make it multi-threaded since it will only increase the context switching; this task when distributed across different CPU’s would perform better and would be more efficient. Kim elaborated on why threading is non-deterministic and how a single statement, as we see it, can result in multiple lines of IL instructions. She emphasized that now that CPU power is not following Moore’s law and hence we need to distribute as hardware vendors have also started to follow distributed computing model more and more. After a detailed discussion about Kernel threads and User thread mapping in Solaris and Windows XP threading models, windows computing clusters were also brought up by one of the audience. The speaker explained that digipede’s framework is different because it allows the framework libraries to distribute the task empowering the developer.
Kim has recently finished some C++ and Excel automation work and demonstrated audience a Monte-Carlo retirement calculator simulation in excel distributed across grid. Connected to her workplace grid, a 30 year retirement calculation which would take ages on a local machine was completed in minutes. A similar demonstration was also done with Mandel Brot set. Attributing “Put the computer near data” to Jim Gray of Microsoft Research, Kim explained digipede’s job distribution model, the inherent object oriented design, resource pooling and bridge model. The meeting ended with Q&A section and applause from audience on Kim’s excellent presentation.
Her presentation slides and sample code can be downloaded from here.
References
A Day in the Life Kim Greenlee’s blog
Powers Unfiltered
dan ciruli's West Coast Grid
Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon EC2 / Amazon Web Services
Dan Ciruli on Grid Computing
Digipede
San Gabriel Valley .NET developers group
Remember Me