Thinking Parallel

A Blog on Parallel Programming and Concurrency by Michael Suess

Archive for 2007/01

Matrix Optimization Gone Wrong – Reloaded

Who would have thought that such a small article on a Matrix Optimization and its impact on execution time would generate that many comments in such a short time, thanks for all of them! The original point I was trying to make in that article was to always check, if an optimization actually improves matters […]

Matrix Optimization Gone Wrong

The other day, two students of mine showed me some of their code. Part of their task was to fill a two-dimensional matrix using the formula: A[i][j] = 2 * i + 3 * j + 1; They showed me an optimization they did to speed up that calculation and I was skeptical. This article […]

Parallel Programming is Entering the Mainstream – or isn’t it?

Alan Zeichick is convinced that parallel programming (threading in this case) is conquering the desktop. To measure how far this adaption goes in a specific organization, he proposes a Threading Maturity Model (ThMM). But I would not have formulated the headline of this article like I did, if I did not see question marks still […]

News for Week 3/2007

Some more news that have caught my attention recently. As always, presented in no particular order and with no guarantee that they are even remotely new – all I am guaranteeing is that I had not seen these articles before and that I found them interesting. Your experience may of course vary :).

Multi-Threaded Challenges in the Game Space – a Conversation with Tom Leonard of Valve Fame

A while ago I posted some comments on the press coverage of an event by Valve, where they explained threading in the Source Engine to a couple of tech-journalists. Unfortunately, the coverage left many open questions and some things even appeared to be wrong. Fortunately, Tom Leonard, the threading guru from Valve is a nice […]