My new whitepaper has been published a couple of days ago. This article stems from a client experience where code had to be transitioned to a team of developers non multi-threaded programmers who needed to maintain a parallel application. A simple overview of a possible framework has been also outlined in this paper. Note that Microsoft’s Task Parallel Library also has some similar concepts (and it was released a couple months after this paper was originally written..)

 

In recent years, chip manufacturers have stated that CPU speeds cannot continue to increase. Instead, hardware manufacturers have begun to create chips with more cores, making them available on lower-priced hardware. The responsibility now falls to the software industry to take advantage of these multiple-core processors.

There are currently a plethora of parallelization frameworks available that take advantage of the multi-core machines. Most examples, however, are focused on more scientific or computationally intensive operations such as dealing with prime numbers, ray tracing, or working on matrix operations. Although these are great ways of utilizing the extra horsepower that multiple cores provide, they certainly do not directly help the average enterprise application.

Unfortunately, enterprise development has traditionally not required a multi-threaded development focus for the majority of applications. Consequently, development teams in most enterprises are not well versed in multi-threaded programming. Therefore, just introducing the requirement for parallel I/O via multi-threaded programming with no automated guidance in the form of frameworks and tools is a recipe for disaster.

In this whitepaper, we look at how developers can take advantage of multi-threaded code to reduce the response time of an expense application by 70% by simply applying parallel I/O concepts without changing the current code structure or requiring new training for the development team. Through the use of a parallel I/O framework, development teams can create multi-threaded applications without having to deal with the complex programming of multi-threaded code.

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