Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Microsoft readies parallel development tools

November 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft readies parallel development tools

TAGS: Application Development

Recognizing the growing prominence of multi-core processors and its effects on application development, Microsoft released Thursday a preview of Parallel Extensions to the .Net Framework (ParallelFX), according to a Microsoft executive's blog on Thursday.

"The shift to multi- and many-core processors that is currently underway presents an exciting opportunity for everyone in the software industry," said the executive, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog. " With an expected increase of 10 to 100 times today’s compute processing power, the opportunities to deliver powerful and immersive new user experiences and business value are just awesome.

"Today we released an early preview of the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework (ParallelFX) technology, available for download on MSDN. This release contains new APIs to make programming on the .Net Framework simpler as well as supporting documentation and samples," Somaseger said.

ParallelFX runs on .Net FX 3.5 and relies on features available in C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0. Among the features are parallel data and task parallelism APIs and a concurrency runtime to enable lightweight tasks and map and balance concurrency expressed in code to concurrent resources on the execution platform.

Microsoft also has released an MSDN dev center dedicated to concurrent programming. Featured is a collection of whitepapers, including one that describes Microsoft's broader vision for parallel computing.

"Although we understand the shift to parallel computing is a gradual road ahead for our whole industry, we are excited by the prospect and believe that the ParallelFX library is a large step in the right direction," Somasegar said.

Posted by Paul Krill on November 29, 2007 02:41 PM

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