InfoQ

News

PLINQ Has Been Released As Parallel Extensions

Posted by Jonathan Allen on Dec 04, 2007 06:00 AM

Community
.NET
Topics
Performance & Scalability
Tags
PLINQ,
Parallel Programming

When it was originally announced, Parallel Extensions was named PLINQ or Parallel LINQ. At that time it was a LINQ provider that could automatically parallelize queries. But since then the scope has grown significantly.

One of the most important changes is that it is no longer limited to queries. Acknowledging that some algorithms cannot be naturally expressed in LINQ, there will also be a set of imperative data parallel APIs.

For example, there is a Parallel For syntax that relies on anonymous functions. Unfortunately for VB users, it isn't nearly as clean in languages that don't support multi-line anonymous functions. Another option is the Threading.Tasks namespace. This supports an advanced task manager for scheduling operations. Unlike the thread pool currently used, tasks can be related to one another. This allows one to cancel one task and have all its child tasks automatically canceled. You can learn more about tasks and task managers on the Parallel Programming with .NET blog.

There are some widely requested features that not yet present in Parallel Extensions. Joe Duffy lists some of these including verifiable thread safety and automatic parallelism. Another feature being considered is the use of graphics processors for general-purpose uses.

The CTP for Parallel Extensions requires .NET 3.5.

Related Sponsor

Terracotta is Scalability and Availability for Java Applications. It clusters the JVM itself, which dramatically simplifies development and reduces database dependency.

No comments

Reply

Exclusive Content

Agile Project Management: Lessons Learned at Google

In this presentation filmed during QCon 2007, Jeff Sutherland, the creator of Scrum, talks about his visit at Google to do an analysis of Google's first implementation of Scrum.

AtomServer – The Power of Publishing for Data Distribution

In this article, Bryon Jacob and Chris Berry introduce AtomServer, their implementation of a full-fledged Atom Store based on Apache Abdera, which is now available as open source.

An Introduction to Virtualization

It is easy to think that virtualization applies only to servers. In reality the recent resurgence of the concept is also being applied to networking, storage, and application infrastructure.

REST Anti-Patterns

In this article, Stefan Tilkov explains some of the most common anti-patterns found in applications that claim to follow a "RESTful" design and suggests ways to avoid them.

Choosing between Routing and Orchestration in an ESB

In this article, Adrien Louis and Marc Dutoo discuss the differences and relative merits of using orchestration vs. routing in a typical ESB setup, and discuss various implementation options.

Enterprise Batch Processing with Spring

Wayne Lund discusses batch processing, Spring Batch objectives and features, scenarios for usage, Spring Batch architecture, scaling, example code, failures and retrying, and the future roadmap.

User Story Estimation Techniques

Developer Jay Fields draws on his experiences as a ThoughtWorks consultant to describe effective user story estimation techniques.

Security (CAS and OpenID) with Ruby

In this talk from QCon SF 2007, Justin Gehtland explains two open solutions to distributed identity and their Rails integration components: OpenID (using ruby-openid) and CAS (using rubycas-client).